The British Impact on India

To My Wife

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List of Maps

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Preface

From one point of view it is too soon to write of the British impact on India, for we are still too near to the transfer of power to get the perspective right, or to achieve objectivity, however hard we strive. The writer had, therefore, grave doubts as to the wisdom of undertaking this work at all. On the other hand, there is a place in historical studies for contemporary opinion and it seemed that an estimate of British influence on India, by one who was a close spectator of the events leading up to Indian independence, might not be without value. Even the deficiencies in judgment, or the prejudices of such a writer, might be taken as reflecting enlightened British opinion on the Indian question in the middle of the twentieth century and might thus be of use to some future historian when the lapse of time renders possible an authoritative appraisement of British work in India.

The views expressed in this book have been formed not only by many years’ study of Indian history but also by innumerable discussions with Indian friends with whom the writer has come into contact, first as an Indian Civil Servant, then as a member of the Indian Legislative Assembly, and finally as a business man. Amongst them must be singled out for particular gratitude Pandit Suresh Chandra Kabyatirtha, an obscure High School teacher in the small town of Contai in Bengal, but a man of great learning, who first taught the writer the fascination of Indian studies.

Thanks are also due to Mr. S. C. Sutton and the staff of what used to be the India Office Library for the courtesy and facilities that they have extended to me. Finally, I must thank my secretary, Miss Taylor, for her great help in the preparation of this book.

P. J. G.

Bickley,
July, 1952

Introduction

Changes of fashion are as decisive, though perhaps not as frequent, in thought as in clothes, and one of the most interesting examples of such a change is provided by the contrast between the self-confident imperialism of nineteenth-century Britain and the vague belief of the English-speaking peoples today in self-determination as a principle of universal validity. Imperialism is dead as a doornail, and many of our modern writers seem almost ashamed that it ever existed. This view leads them into a logical dilemma, for it involves a condemnation of the main process by which civilisation has been diffused. It necessitates a denial of the benefits conferred on mankind by the Roman Empire and of the great stimulus to the material and spiritual development of India provided by the full-blooded imperialism of the Guptas.

Attempts have been made to escape from this dilemma by arguing that in the present stage of human development, knowledge and culture can be spread by other means than conquest or domination, and that empires have thus become anachronisms. The argument is not convincing, and a more satisfying solution consists in recognition that imperialism is in itself neither good nor bad, but must be judged by its quality and results. It is, indeed, but the outward expression of national energy and exuberance, the outcome of a spirit of exaltation which at times seems to possess a whole nation. Such a spirit worked strongly amongst the ancient Romans in the two centuries before the Christian era; it animated Englishmen from the days of Elizabeth, and Germans after the time of Frederick the Great; and it may well operate powerfully in an India rejoicing in its new-found freedom.

Imperialism is indeed a regularly recurring historical phenomenon, calling for neither approval nor condemnation in the abstract, and a more profitable exercise is to consider particular imperialisms and assess their spirit and their achievements. It may perhaps be taken for granted that for a people who have reached a high level of political consciousness foreign rule is spiritually debilitating. On the other hand, few would doubt that the Norman Conquest of England provided the impulse which was in due course to generate nationalism and a unique political genius. Our object in this book is to consider to what pattern the British Empire in India conformed, and in fact to answer the question as to whether the people of India have been affected for good or for ill by the British connection.

In this enquiry we shall not be led into speculation as to what would have happened if the British had not become the ruling power in India. It may be that in due course order would have emerged out of the chaos that then prevailed, but it is idle to guess as to what would have taken the place of the moribund Mughal Empire or as to how India and the Western World would have established contact and interacted. Britain was in fact the catalytic agent by which Western influence was brought to bear on India, and the only practical approach to our problem is to examine conditions and tendencies in pre-British India, to consider how they were modified in the British period and to let Britain take the praise or the blame for the results.

Section I — The Historical Background

Chapter I

Hindu India

Some thirty years ago a story was current in Cambridge regarding a distinguished historian, well known for his almost exclusive concentration on the Ancient World, who by some mischance found himself set down to lecture on the distasteful subject of Modern Economic History. In the first lecture of the series he explained, in scholarly terms, how all understanding of modern problems depended on knowledge of historical foundations; and then, happy in his escape, he devoted the entire series of lectures to the Barbarian Invasions of Rome. The story is perhaps too good to be true, but it has a bearing on the present chapter.

If an intelligent observer with little historical or ethnological knowledge were asked to classify the main elements in the population of India he would probably make a threefold division. In the first place he would distinguish the people of the south from those of the north —the speakers of Dravidian from those of Aryan languages; and, secondly, he would separate the Hindus from the Muslims. His conclusion might be that there were three main layers of population in India—Dravidian, Northern Hindu or Indo-Aryan, and Muslim. A professional ethnologist would throw up his hands in horror at this unscientific statement. Nevertheless, it would convey more of the truth to a general reader than would a scientific catalogue, and no assessment of the impact of Britain on India is possible without some knowledge of the historical processes by which these three layers of population were formed.

Much of our knowledge of early Indian history is based on little more than intelligent archaeological and ethnological guesses. We do not know with any certainty who were the first inhabitants of the country, or when they suffered invasion and conquest. We do, however, know that climatic changes in Central Asia several thousand years ago gave rise to a series of great mass migrations. In a fascinating study of Chinese Turkistan at a later period Sir Aurel Stein has shown how water supplies in many parts of that country failed, how town after town was abandoned, and how as a result the populations migrated in the first millennium of our era. The process of desiccation was at work long before that period, and over a much wider area than Chinese Turkistan, and may have been one of the factors which led to successive invasions of India, extending over many centuries.

We know little about the early stages of these invasions, but there is some ground for thinking that the first invaders were a people now conveniently but unscientifically described as Dravidians. It seems probable that when they abandoned their arid homelands for the well-watered plains of India they found the country inhabited by a primitive negroid type, whom they rapidly overcame. In the process, however, they intermarried, and the resulting stock possessed the characteristics of the aborigines rather than of the newcomers, so that the whole of India came to be mainly inhabited by a people who were short, dark, hairy, broad-nosed and long-headed. The invaders must have reached a high level of civilisation, and their culture easily prevailed over that of their predecessors. Although the Dravidians occupied all India, the main centres of their civilisation were in the south, and in that region many wealthy cities sprang up. Commerce in jewels, spices and cotton cloth proved lucrative, and, like the Phoeniceans, the Dravidians were led by the lure of trade to learn the art of navigation. At an early date they carried on an extensive overseas commerce. It is impossible to give even approximate dates for the commencement or development of their culture and commerce, but it can safely be said that they were left in undisturbed possession of all India until about 2000 B.C., or perhaps later.

About that time a people of a very different type, who have been described as ‘generally fair, tall, long-headed and good-looking’, and whose language was unintelligible to the Dravidians, invaded India from the north-west and settled in what we now call the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. Practically nothing was known as to the ancestry or affinities of these early Hindus until, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Sir William Jones and other European philologists began to study Sanskrit—the language of the Hindu Scriptures and the recognisable descendant of the language spoken by the Aryan invaders of India. These scholars were profoundly impressed by the similarity in vocabulary and structure between Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and German. The resemblance was indeed unmistakable, as can be illustrated in the following table:

English	Indian Language	Latin or Greek	German
Mother	Mata	Mater	Mütter
Father	Pita	Pater	Vater
Daughter	Duhita	θνγατηϱ	Tochter
Is	Asti	Est	Ist
Eight	Ashta	ὀκτω	Acht

Archaeology gradually reinforced the conclusions of the philologists, and in due course the common ancestry of the early Hindu invaders, the Persians and most of the peoples of Europe, was established. The common ancestors are generally known as Aryans, though some writers have preferred to call them ‘Wiros’ in view of the fact that ‘Wir’ appears, with modifications, in a very large number of the Aryan languages as the word for ‘man’. At a time which must have been several thousand years before our era, and in a locality which is still undetermined, the Aryans split into two groups, one of which moved into Europe. At a late date—and possibly a little before 2000 B.C.—a further split occurred, and one part of the family moved into Persia, while the other branch started to migrate to India through the passes of the north-west. The migrations extended over a considerable period, and the migrants were not just invading armies but rather colonists, for they brought with them their families and their live-stock.

These newcomers took possession of the Indus plain, driving the presumably Dravidian inhabitants east and south. Here in the course of a few centuries they progressed from the pastoral to the agricultural stage, and from tribal to larger forms of political organisation. Kingship began to appear in place of tribal leadership.

Our knowledge of the first thousand years or so of Hindu history is derived mainly from the Four Vedas or Sacred Scriptures. Three of these works are essentially hymnbooks, while the fourth is a collection of magic formulae, and the picture of Hindu life obtained from them is necessarily incomplete.

It is, however, clear that much of the energy of these early Hindus was devoted to war. The Dravidians were wealthy, and skilled in military science, and it was only after stern struggles, extending over centuries, that the Aryans¹ secured undisputed possession of the Indus valley.

In the meantime great developments in thought and religion took place. The early Vedic religion was little more than a personification of the powers of nature—the Storm Gods, the Gods of the Rain Cloud, the Dawn, and many others who were thought constantly to influence the life of the ordinary man. Long before the end of the Vedic period, however, the conception of the unity of the universe was beginning to emerge, and theories regarding the soul and immortality were being developed. The caste system in anything like its modern form had not come into existence, but the profound contempt of the Aryans for the dark-skinned Dravidians had perhaps laid the foundations on which the system would ultimately be built, and already priests and warriors were contending for supremacy.

It is, unfortunately, impossible to assign dates to any of these developments, and the attempt to do so, even approximately, is not unlike the work of a land-surveyor in the deltaic districts of East Bengal. In that region where mighty rivers change their courses year by year, destroying all land-marks, the surveyor may have to go many miles from his objective before he finds an identifiable point on which to base his measurements, and the resulting margin of error is great. So, too, in ancient Indian history, no date before the invasion of Alexander in the fourth century B.C. can be fixed precisely. Earlier chronology is based on deductions backwards from that point, and, as might be expected, the guesses of scholars differ widely from one another. The best guess yet made suggests that the composition of the Vedas was begun about 1200 B.C. They are thus the oldest-known literature in any Indo-European language, and it has rightly been said of the Rig-Veda that ‘It stands quite by itself high up on an isolated peak of remote antiquity’.

At about the end of the Vedic period a dynamic spirit seems to have animated the Indo-Aryans. No longer content with the valley of the Indus, they overran the plains of the Ganges and the Jamna, driving the Dravidian inhabitants to the south and the east. Intermarriage took place on a large scale, but the Aryan influence prevailed, and before long all India north of the Vindhya Mountains was inhabited by a people of whose mainly Aryan origin there could be no doubt.

As has so often happened in history, a period of great military activity was also an era of remarkable mental and spiritual progress. During the early days of the Hindu occupation of these new lands to the east, the foundations of the Hindu religion as it exists today were firmly laid.

Perhaps the most important happening of this age was the development of an elaborate religious philosophy, having as its focal point the belief in reincarnation. That belief has been held by many peoples, but the distinguishing features of the Hindu doctrine were, first, its emphasis on conduct as the factor inexorably determining the form of rebirth, and, second, its profoundly pessimistic basis. ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward’ was the keynote. Life was sorrow, and rebirth was therefore a misfortune, and so the central problem for the philosopher was to discover the path of escape from the miserable cycle. As regards the relations of man with God and the Universe, there were several different schools of thought. Perhaps the most influential of these—and certainly that which has attracted most attention from Western scholars—was that which completely identified God with creation. Whereas the pantheist teaches that God is in everything, according to this view God is everything. He is this paper and the ink on it, and He is the writer, too. All separateness is an illusion.

To the modern Western mind it might seem that such a philosophy must lead to a negative and fatalistic attitude towards life and so conduce to inactivity and stagnation. In fact, however, ancient India displayed a remarkable vitality, which expressed itself not only in missionary and mercantile enterprise but also in large-scale colonisation in the Far East. Perhaps the explanation of this contrast lies in the divergence between philosophy and popular religion which is so marked in Hinduism throughout the ages. The ordinary Hindu was (and is) more concerned with the local village gods than with Immanent Deity, and more anxious to make certain of material happiness in the life to come than to seek the cold comfort of absorption into the World Soul. Thus there grew, side by side with Brahmanism, a popular Hinduism, compounded of tribal hopes and fears and superstitions, in which the idealistic and the grosser elements were strangely intermingled. The Brahmans wisely adapted themselves to what was evidently a popular need and developed an elaborate religion of works. Ceremonial began to be of greatest importance, vital indeed to a man’s future well-being; and naturally the Brahman priest, the expert who knew the magic words, became the most important member of society. Even the warrior began to take second place.

At the same time a complex social code grew up. It has frequently been said that Hinduism is not only a religion but a set of social laws governing every aspect of human life, from conception until long after death. It is not easy for a Westerner to realise how religion permeates every phase of Hindu activity or suffering. Eating and drinking, work, marriage, childbirth, death, cremation and inheritance—all are regulated by the code appropriate to the caste and status of the individual concerned. The essentials of this social discipline were established in the period when the Hindus were fighting for supremacy in the valleys of the Ganges and the Jumna; and though there have been many modifications in succeeding ages, the general pattern of Hindu society as we know it had been established by the seventh century B.C. Caste, the most important characteristic of Hindu society, had by then assumed something like its modern form. The essence of the caste system is that a man’s caste is determined solely by birth, that he must not marry outside it, and that in general he must not eat with a man of another caste. The origins of caste are obscure, and it need only be said here that it was partly occupational and partly based on the distinction between the conquering Aryan and the conquered or despised Dravidian, who was gradually absorbed into the Aryan or Hindu system. For centuries it gave to Hindu society its main element of stability.

The descendants of the original Aryan invaders continued to live mainly in the north of India, leaving the land south of the River Narbada to the Dravidians, and little mingling of the two races took place in that area. The south in this respect presented a marked contrast to the north, where at least in some areas the Aryan stock was considerably modified by intermarriage. Brahman influence, however, began to penetrate to the south, though we know little as to the time when, or the stages by which, this took place. Gradually Hinduism permeated the whole of India and everywhere became the basis of social and religious life. As has often happened in other parts of the world, the dominant culture was considerably influenced by the beliefs and customs of those on whom it was imposed, and the phallic element, which played a large part in the Dravidian outlook, soon acquired an important place in Hinduism.

It is not necessary for the purpose of this book to study in detail the history of the centuries between the Aryan conquest of the Ganges valley and the coming of the Muslims some sixteen hundred years later. Again and again in this period India was invaded by people from the north-west—Greeks, Persians, Scythians and others; but such was the resistant and absorptive power of Hinduism that these invasions produced remarkably little permanent effect. For our particular purpose they may be ignored.

In the sphere of religion, the sixth and seventh centuries B.C. were a time of restless activity. Buddhism and Jainism emerged from that ferment, and for centuries Buddhism was the premier religion of India. It had much in common with Hinduism. Buddhism, it is true, rejected caste and insisted on the sanctity of animal life; but both religions had reincarnation as their central doctrine, both were pessimistic in their general outlook, and both sought escape from the cycle of rebirth. In due course Buddhism in India was again absorbed by the older religion, and India remained essentially a Hindu land until the second millennium of our era.

Hinduism is generally considered to have reached its zenith by the time of the Gupta dynasty; that is to say, by the fourth century A.D. For two thousand years its development had been steady, but now the dynamic impulse seemed to have spent itself, and henceforth Hindu civilisation was static. In learning, language and art, the six hundred years between the Guptas and the Muslim invasions were characterised by the elaboration of old forms rather than by new principles and discoveries. The age was one of commentators rather than original thinkers.

In the political field little large-scale development took place, and the history of India during these centuries is, on the whole, dreary and uninspiring. By the seventh century B.C. political organisation had grown to what was destined to be the limit of its development under the Hindus. Monarchy had become firmly established, and we are told that at this time North India consisted of sixteen kingdoms and a number of principalities. From time to time one or other of the warring kingdoms gained some kind of paramountcy over its neighbours, but this seldom involved direct rule or lasted long. At a fairly early stage of Indian history the village community had assumed the form and organisation which it retained until modern times. This achievement and the evolution of the caste system seem to have exhausted the political inventiveness of the Hindus and left them unable to build forms of government suitable for great and enduring kingdoms. In the two to three thousand years between the arrival in India of the Aryans and the invasion of India by Muslims from the north-west, only for three brief periods was there anything approaching a unified government in North India.

For the first of these exceptions we must go back to the fourth century B.C., that is, to a time shortly after the invasion and partial conquest of North-west India by Alexander the Great, when Chandragupta Maurya drove out the Greeks, seized the throne of Magadha or South Bihar, and rapidly extended his rule over most of India north of the River Narbada. It is interesting to note that it was the identification in modern times of Chandragupta with the Sandrakottus of the Greek historians that provided the starting point for the scientific study of ancient Indian chronology. The Maurya Empire was characterised by its powerful bureaucracy, its all-pervading espionage, and according to some classical writers by its oppressiveness. A modern historian, quoting Justin, says: ‘The usurper turned into slavery the semblance of liberty which he had won for the Indians by his expulsion of the Macedonians, and oppressed the people with a cruel tyranny.’

The third ruler of this dynasty, the great Asoka, who brought to his task a high practical morality, is known to us better than any other early Indian monarch by reason of his famous Pillar and Rock Edicts. More than thirty great pillars, each forty feet or so high, were erected ‘in conspicuous positions at important cities, places of pilgrimage or frequented roads in the home provinces’, and on them were inscribed high moral and political principles and exhortations. The most famous of the inscriptions is the Toleration Edict. ‘A man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another without reason.’ ‘The sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.’

This principle of tolerance, nevertheless, did not prevent Asoka, after his conversion to Buddhism about 261 B.C., from launching one of the greatest missionary enterprises known to history, or from enforcing on all classes of the population compliance with the conduct prescribed by his new beliefs. Elaborate regulations prohibiting or restricting the slaughter of animals must have pressed hardly upon a people who believed animal sacrifice to be necessary to salvation. These and other regulations were meticulously enforced by a vast army of censors and other officials.

This kind of régime is seldom attractive to the ordinary man, and there must have been many of Asoka’s courtiers who longed to see the imperial sermons replaced by the Royal Hunts of old. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps because the empire was too centralised, it disintegrated almost immediately after the death of Asoka, and North India again became a network of warring states.

Six hundred years later, in the golden age of Hindu art and literature, the Gupta dynasty for a short time brought most of Northern India under its beneficent sway. Four successive rulers of exceptional ability and strength of character held this vast empire together, and the Chinese pilgrims of that age testify to the mild but efficient administration. Unfortunately for India, this empire, too, contained the seeds of its own dissolution, and in the time of the fourth emperor the Huns and other invaders destroyed it totally.

Only once again during the Hindu period was there anything like a unified government of North India. In the seventh century King Harsha, ‘the human dynamo’, created a vast empire, extending as far as Assam. He made no attempt to reproduce the elaborate administrative machine of the Mauryas or the Guptas, but ‘travelled incessantly throughout his dominions, radiating energy wherever he went and imposing his will by the sheer force of his personality’. His death was the signal for complete disintegration, and during the centuries which were to pass before the establishment of Muslim rule there was to be no further attempt at empire-building. India just before the Muslim period was no nearer to political unity, even in the north, than she had been a thousand years earlier, and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the Hindus had proved themselves lacking in large-scale political genius. They had given India a religion and a way of life, but they had left it fragmented and unstable.

Chapter II

Muslim India

From the eleventh century new influences from abroad began to be felt, or perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say that Hindu India began to experience the first of a series of shocks which, nine centuries later, would result in the creation of Pakistan. In the seventh century the Prophet Muhammad released one of the most potent forces in the world. The power of Islam grew so rapidly that within little more than a hundred years his successors were ruling ‘an empire which extended from the Atlantic to the Indus, and from the Caspian to the cataracts of the Nile and included Spain and Portugal besides many other territories’.

Soon after the death of the Prophet, fanaticism and cupidity turned the thoughts of the Arabs to India, but an expedition by sea against the coast of Sindh ended disastrously. The Khalifa had already learned from one of his generals to regard the sea as ‘a great pool which some senseless people furrow, looking like worms upon logs of wood’, and this disaster confirmed his prejudice. Muslims were prohibited from practising the art of navigation, and, although the prohibition was withdrawn later, the conquests of Islam were to be by land and not by sea. By the eighth century the territory between Arabia and Sindh had come under Muslim rule, and in A.D. 712 Muhammad bin Qasim launched the Muslim attack on Sindh. Then, as indeed throughout the history of their struggles with the Muslims, the Hindus were so torn by dissensions that any kind of united resistance was impossible. Iswari Prasad, the distinguished historian of Mediaeval India, tells us that many of the Hindu Jats and Meds, who had long suffered intolerable oppressions by the local Hindu Government, were glad to assist the invaders. ‘They had been forbidden to ride in saddles, wear fine clothes, to uncover the head’, and this condemnation to the position of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water had embittered animosities to such an extent that they readily threw in their lot with the foreigner.

The Arabs thus had little difficulty in conquering Sindh, but they soon proved incapable either of establishing a stable government or of extracting any substantial gain from that infertile land. Little support was forthcoming from the Khalifa, and the new kingdom soon broke up. The independent Muslim chiefs, who succeeded to its fragments, left little permanent mark on the country, and the Arab conquest has been described by Stanley Lane-Poole as ‘an episode in the history of India and Islam, a triumph without results’. That statement requires qualification, in the sense that Arab culture was considerably influenced by this early contact with Hinduism. The civilisation of India was then at a high level, and we are told by the Indian historian quoted above that ‘Arab scholars sat at the feet of Buddhist monks and Brahman pundits to learn philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, chemistry and other subjects of study’. There may be an element of pardonable exaggeration in this statement, but it is not without foundation.

The natural approach to India is not through Sindh, but from the north-west. Three hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sindh Muslims from Ghazni and Ghor in Afghanistan entered by the true gateway, and for the first time the Hindus of the North were brought up against a relentless and proselytising foe. The invaders, who were mainly Turks, were men of a very different type from the cultured Arabs who had conquered Sindh. Fanaticism and greed of wealth and power played a large part in their make-up, and both these vices lured them on to India. Mahmud of Ghazni had dedicated his life to war on the Unbeliever, and had gathered about him a body of zealots, to whom war and pillage in the name of Islam were the be-all and end-all of earthly life. Again and again they poured down into the plains of the northwest, slaying, ravaging, and enforcing acceptance of Islam, and then returning to their mountain home with vast booty and the coveted title of Ghazi, or slayer of infidels. Their fierce fanaticism and their belief that death in a holy war ensured entry into paradise made them pitiless, and consequently far more terrifying than ordinary invaders. Throughout the Muslim annals of this period runs the note of exultation in the massacre or torture of infidels. Thus Minhaj-ud-din writes of an occasion on which the Muslims defeated the Hindus, ‘killing fifteen thousand of them, spreading them like a carpet over the ground and making them food for beasts and birds of prey’. Two hundred years later the same spirit still prevailed, and we are told, in a panegyric on Kutb-ud-din Aibak, that ‘his gifts were bestowed by hundreds of thousands and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands’.

During the next five hundred years many races played their part in the Muslim invasion of India—Persians, Turks, Afghans, and later that strange people known as Mongols, whose name inspired such universal terror in the Middle Ages. The early Mongol raids, made while the raiders were still heathen, produced little permanent effect; their large-scale attacks, begun under Timur, better known in English literature as Tamerlaine, occurred after their conversion to Islam. All these different races of invaders thus, in turn, brought new waves of Islamic zeal to India. The task of the invaders was facilitated by the bitter jealousies and dissensions which made it impossible for the Hindu princes to unite even in the face of this common danger.

Never was this fatal inability shown more clearly than at the second Battle of Tarain, which, in 1192, finally ensured the domination of the Muslims. There seems to have been a strange consciousness amongst the Hindus that their fate depended on this battle, and innumerable rajas temporarily put aside their quarrels and prepared to fight in the common cause. Two great princes far outclassed all others in power and reputation—Prithvi Raj of Delhi, and Jaichand of Kanauj, regarded by the Muslim annalists as the greatest king of India at that time. One of the most celebrated of Indian ballads tells of the abduction by Prithvi Raj of Jaichand’s daughter and of the bitter feud that arose between the two princes. The only hope of the Hindus was that Jaichand would for a time forget his personal wrongs and stand side by side with Prithvi against the forces of Islam. This, however, was not to be. Jaichand lay sulking in his tents, the Hindus were completely defeated and demoralised, and Prithvi Raj was slain. Two years later, in spite of his three hundred elephants, Jaichand was also defeated and slain by Sultan Muhammad, and, in the conventional words of the chronicler, ‘his body was thrown to the dust of contempt’.

This is but one instance out of many which could be culled from Indian history of the inability of the Hindus at this period to combine. They had reached the limit of their political development, and were unable to stretch out to that wider conception which alone could have saved them. In the striking words of Iswari Prasad: ‘What India lacked was political unity and social solidarity. Her leaders counted by hundreds; her energy was frittered away in petty squabbles between the various states. She may correctly be described during this period as merely a geographical expression.’

This Hindu deficiency, combined with the inability of any Hindu army before the time of the Mahrattas to make proper use of mobile cavalry, made it possible for the invading Muslims to advance quickly to Delhi—a place ordained by its geographical situation to be a great centre of power—and to make themselves before long, at least nominally, the masters of Northern India. Their power followed a kind of ‘inverse square of the distance’ law, and the outlying parts of their empire during most of this period were in a state of semi-independence.

The history of the five hundred years between the first Muslim invasions and the foundation of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century is neither elevating nor of general importance for the purpose of this book. The chronicles, which tell us singularly little of the point of view of those outside court circles, are largely filled with tedious stories of dynastic intrigues and political murders. For five hundred years the Muslims failed to build up a stable polity. Dynasty followed dynasty in quick succession, power was never properly consolidated, and most of the energy of the best rulers was taken up with disposing of rivals and rebels, while not a few of the early Muslim kings of Delhi devoted their main energies to the pleasures of the harem. One or two gifted and far-sighted monarchs developed irrigation, organised the revenue system, and advanced the welfare of their subjects, but this was the exception rather than the rule, and in general the early Muslims in India displayed no more constructive political genius than had their Hindu predecessors.

Shortly before the reign of Queen Elizabeth of England a new strain of Muslim invaders, who in the fullness of time would prove to be endowed with greater political capacity than their predecessors, appeared in India. The newcomers belonged to a particular clan of Mongols who, since their conversion to Islam, had freely intermarried with Persians, Turks and other Muslim peoples. Babur, the first of the Indian Mughals, was typical of this intermingling of race, one of his grandparents being a Turk, while the other three were descendants of that Timur or Tamerlaine whom Christopher Marlowe introduced to English playgoers. Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ was well suited to the exploits of Tamerlaine, who in the course of thirty years made his authority felt from Siberia to the Sea of Azov, and from the Caspian Sea to Delhi. Men began to think of him as almost invincible, and everywhere in the East the magic of his name prepared the way for his conquests. Truly it might have seemed to the subject peoples that, in the words of Marlowe:

And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Death, nevertheless, brought his work to an end in 1405, and almost immediately his vast empire split into many warring kingdoms, each held by one of his heirs. Ninety years later a man endowed with Timur’s own vitality and restless energy was the ruler of one of those kingdoms, that of Ferghana to the north of Afghanistan. Zahir-ud-din Muhammad, better known as Babur, was one of the romantic characters of the mediaeval East, and his Memoirs vividly convey his zest for life in all its aspects. It goes without saying that, as a Mongol chief, he knew the fierce joy of battle, but to it he brought a keen military intelligence and was one of the first Asiatic soldiers to employ and understand the importance of artillery. He had much in common with the soldier-poets of Elizabethan England. Poetry and art were as essential to his being as was conquest, and his memoirs reveal not only a love of every aspect of natural beauty, but also an almost supersensitive nature. Yet to this he added a full share of the Mongol savagery, and inherited intemperance, and a complete callousness about human life.

After having established himself as King of Kabul, he began a series of invasions of India in which, like every other invader of that country throughout history, he was aided by the apparent inability of the local rulers to combine, even for the purposes of common defence. There were at that time three Muslim candidates for the throne of Delhi, and two of them at different times entered into alliance with Babur, who completely defeated the reigning Emperor Ibrahim Lodi at the first battle of Panipat in 1526 and thereby made himself master of Northern India. ‘This success,’ writes Babur in his Memoirs, ‘I do not ascribe to my own strength, nor did this good fortune flow from my own efforts, but from the fountain of the favour and mercy of God.’ This attitude was as characteristic of the various Muslim invaders of India as it was of the Israelites of old.

Babur’s first impressions of India, as recorded in the Memoirs, were unfavourable. ‘Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits there is none; of genius and capacity none; of manners none; in handicraft and work there is no form of symmetry, method or quality; there are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no Hot-baths, no Colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.’ This description is naturally resented by Hindu writers, but there can be little doubt that, in spite of its intellectual achievements, in the art of living mediaeval India was behind Persia and the neighbouring countries.

These unfavourable impressions did not lessen Babur’s determination to conquer the country, although the fact that many of his chiefs took a similar view of the land sometimes made it difficult to keep their enthusiasm alive. In spite of this difficulty, Babur rapidly compelled the Muslim rulers of the territories east of Delhi to acknowledge his overlordship. He had, however, a more serious foe to face.

Throughout Indian history the name of Chitor has stood for valour and military prowess. Shortly before the Battle of Panipat, Rana Sangram of Chitor had tried to form a confederacy of Rajput chiefs against Ibrahim Lodi, the King of Delhi. There could be no security for Babur until the power of the Rajputs was broken, and to this end, in 1527, Babur bent all his energies. During the preliminary skirmishes enforced inactivity lay heavy upon Babur and his soldiers, and induced in Babur himself a rare fit of depression, leading to penitence and the resolve to reform. His conscience reminded him of the Quranic prohibition of the drinking of wine and his own free indulgence in that pleasure. In the words of Colonel Malleson: ‘He resolved at once to amend. Sending for his golden wine cups and his silver goblets, he had them destroyed in his presence, giving the proceeds of the sale of the precious metal to the poor. All the wine in the camp was rendered undrinkable or poured on the ground.’ Three hundred of his nobles followed his example. It is not difficult to imagine the reluctance of the nobles, or their hopes that preferment would result.

Thus spiritually fortified, and assisted also by Turkish gunners, Babur ‘gained a victory so decisive that on the morrow all Rajputana lay at his feet’. It is reasonable to hope that the wine cups and the goblets were capable of salvage, and that an austerity wholly unnatural to Babur’s joyous temperament was terminated by this victory.

Babur died shortly after his ascendancy had been established, and it is an idle but interesting speculation as to whether he would in time have consolidated his conquests.

His son, Humayun, able and cultured but easy-going and indolent, lost his father’s empire to a man of very different calibre, Sher Shah. Towards the end of his life Humayun made a supreme effort, and, thanks largely to the genius of his principal general, Bairam Khan, regained much of his father’s empire. This episode is only relevant to the purpose of this book because Sher Shah was a great administrator, who not only laid the foundations of the revenue system of India, but also contributed much to the general administration and development of the country.

On the evening of 23rd January 1556 Humayun, who delighted in discussions with learned men, was sitting on the roof of his library in Delhi, when the call for prayer sounded. Like a good Muslim, he hastened to obey its summons, but slipped and fell down the steep stairs, and thus, in the words of the chronicler, ‘he stumbled out of life as he had stumbled through it’.

Up to this point the Mughals had in no real sense taken root in India. Babur was first and last a conqueror, concerned only with consolidating his conquests, while of Humayun it had been said: ‘He ruled eight years in India without contributing a single stone to the foundation of an empire that was to remain.’ It was, indeed, left to his son Jalal-ud-din Akbar to lay that foundation. At the age of thirteen, in 1556, Akbar succeeded to a precarious throne and a devastated kingdom, in which the effects of war had been aggravated by one of the worst famines known in Indian history. Before his death, fifty years later, he had established Mughal authority firmly throughout Northern India, and had extended its power over a large area south of the Vindhya mountains. For the first time in a thousand years much of India had been brought under a uniform rule. Akbar had secured the loyalty of the leading Hindu chiefs, and he had impressed on a large part of India a permanent pattern of administration.

Akbar’s approach to the problem of governing a vast empire was wholly different from that of his predecessors on the throne of Delhi. Whereas they for the most part had been content to rule as foreigners, contemptuous of Hindu customs and prejudices, Akbar deliberately identified his interests with those of the country and set himself to unite all his subjects, Hindus and Muslims alike, in a common, willing allegiance to himself.

Such a policy obviously involved tolerance and respect for Hindu ideas, but, even apart from political necessity, Akbar’s enquiring and rational mind was naturally antagonistic to the dogmatism of orthodox Muslim teachers. He soon rejected the usual assumptions of Islamic theology and set himself to search for truth from other sources. Teachers of all religions were welcome at his court, and many midnight hours were spent in theological debate. In 1578 he sent to the Portuguese Viceroy at Goa for ‘two fathers well versed in letters’ to expound to him the mysteries of the Christian faith, and after some hesitation the Viceroy sent Father Monserrate and Father Aquaviva to the court at Agra. After their arrival a great disputation was held, in which men of several faiths participated. Abul Fazl, the counsellor and biographer of Akbar, relates how Father Aquaviva challenged the Muslim divines to ordeal by fire: ‘If these men have such an opinion of our Book, and if they believe the Kuran to be the true word of God, then let a furnace be lighted and let me with the Gospel in my hand and the learned doctors with their holy book in their hands walk into that testing place of truth and the right will be manifest.’ The challenge was declined, and Akbar seems to have been unreasonably angry with the Muslim divines who professed ‘the mere letter of Islam without a heartfelt conviction’.

These and similar proceedings naturally created discontent amongst the Faithful, but Akbar was still nominally a Muslim, and after a mystical experience similar to what some religious sects would call conversion, he decided to establish his spiritual authority more firmly. In 1570 an infallibility decree, countersigned by the four leading Muslim divines at the court, declared Akbar to be the supreme and infallible interpreter of all points of religious doubt. As a modern writer puts its, henceforth Akbar was pope as well as king.

It is not necessary to follow Akbar any further in his religious extravagances or to examine that strange new faith, compounded largely of Hindu, Parsi and Jain tenets and practices, which he subsequently promulgated. The important fact for our purpose is that he had established a position in which it was possible for him to conciliate Hindu sentiment in many ways. He removed the tax on pilgrimages, and abolished the poll-tax on non-Muslims, for, as he was never tired of asking, ‘Who is certain that he is right?’ It is not altogether easy in these latitudinarian days to realise how unusual this degree of tolerance was, either in India or indeed in Europe, and it is therefore worth while contrasting it with the attitude of one of his most celebrated predecessors. When Ala-ud-din, the Khalji ruler of Delhi at the beginning of the fourteenth century, consulted his principal adviser about the treatment of the conquered Hindus, he received the reply that ‘they are called payers of tribute, and when the revenue officer demands silver from them, they should, without question and with all humility and respect, tender gold. If the tax-collector chooses to spit into the mouth of a Hindu, the latter must open his mouth without hesitation’.

In addition to his acts of tolerance, which mainly affected ordinary folks, Akbar set himself to build alliances with the great Hindu princes of Rajputana—the ancient military aristocracy of India. Here matrimony played its part, and Akbar not only married daughters of three leading Rajput chiefs but gave his son, the future Emperor Jahangir, in marriage to the daughter of the most powerful of the princes of Rajputana, Udai Singh of Jodhpur. Many of the most important Hindu nobles became, in the words of a Muslim chronicler, ‘props and ornaments of the throne’. Hindus governed imperial provinces, commanded imperial armies and were admitted to the closest councils of the emperor.

Unfortunately, Akbar’s tolerance did not extend in full measure to the faith which he had once professed, and which, indeed, he never formally renounced. He seemed to delight in ridiculing Islamic practices, and expelled from court those who stood by the ancient ways of their religion. So seriously did he outrage Muslim sentiment that a renowned jurist, the Qazi of Jaunpur, publicly declared him to be an apostate, against whom it was the duty of good Muslims to rebel. Akbar was strong enough to enforce his will, but resentment smouldered in the hearts of the orthodox, ready to burst into flames under more favourable conditions three generations later. In spite of this limitation, Akbar’s policy of tolerance gave him a position in India which no Muslim ruler had ever held and which was further strengthened by his scientific organisation of the administrative system. The system will be examined in greater detail later in this book, and for the present it is sufficient to note that it gave him a more efficient mastery of the country than had been known before. Thus Akbar laid the foundations on which a durable empire might have been built.

After Akbar’s death in 1605 the easy-going Jahangir, indifferent to religion and married to a Hindu princess, showed no disposition to change his father’s policy of toleration, and throughout his reign he retained the loyalty of the Rajput princes. Unfortunately, intemperance was his besetting sin, as it was indeed of so many of the Mughals, and he tells us in his Memoirs how he abandoned wine in his youth because it had ceased to intoxicate him, and took to spirits instead. He almost drank himself to death at one time, but with the help of his Persian wife, Nur Jahan, recovered and thenceforth ‘limited his consumption of spirits to a quantity which, taken regularly in the evening, sent him to bed more or less befuddled’. From this stage onwards he left the business of government in the hands of Nur Jahan and her family. The empress was an able woman, but seems to have cared little for the welfare of the country. Administration declined rapidly, Provincial Governors tended to become more independent, crime increased, income fell—mainly because of the dishonesty of the collecting agencies—and expenditure rose with the growing luxuriousness of the court. Already the foundations of empire, so carefully laid by Akbar, were being undermined.

Shahjahan, who succeeded his father in 1627, was a man of a very different stamp. Even in youth he was serious-minded and earnest, and Sir Thomas Roe, the English Ambassador to Delhi, describing Shahjahan at the age of twenty-four, writes: ‘I never saw so settled a countenance, nor any man keep so constant a gravity, never smiling, nor in face showing any respect or difference of men.’ In the early part of his reign he displayed considerable energy; he restored something of the vigour of the administration, he put down the lawlessness which had become so serious in the previous reign, and he extended the boundaries of empire to include much of the Deccan. Unfortunately, he combined with this energy something of the bigotry which Akbar and Jahangir had temporarily exorcised from the Mughal court. He set himself to restore the power of Islam, and to this end he demolished many Hindu temples and forbade intermarriage between Hindus and Muslims. Thus he prepared the way for his successor Aurangzib, whose narrow intolerance was to bring the empire down in ruins.

The Mughal Empire reached its zenith under Shahjahan, and travellers from many countries were dazzled with the magnificence of the court and the power of the empire. Thirty years of comparative peace within the empire, together with an expanding revenue, enabled Shahjahan to exercise to the full that love of art and that genius for building which were characteristic of the Mughal line from Babur onwards. Art and learning flourished, while magnificent palaces and sublime mosques alike attested the wealth and taste of the descendants of Timur. The European visitor today derives from the remains of Mughal architecture an inspiration and a sense of greatness which the florid and often grotesque art of the finest Hindu temples can never give him.

Underneath all the outward glory, the foundations of the state were not sound. Tyranny abounded everywhere, taxation was excessive, and canals and irrigation works were seldom maintained. These matters will be considered later, and for the present we can content ourselves with the conclusion of Bernier, the famous traveller who visited India in the middle of the seventeenth century, that ‘thus do ruin and desolation overspread the land’.

The resulting tendency to instability was further strengthened by the ever-recurring struggles for the succession. Jahangir had rebelled against his father Akbar, murdered his father’s trusted counsellor, Abul Fazl, and then secured his own position on the throne by deliberately blinding his rebellious son, Khusro. Shahjahan in due course rebelled against his father, directed the assassination of his blinded brother Khusro, and after his own accession had his other brother, Sharyar, blinded, and all his male collateral relatives put to death. In the course of thirty years the wheel of retribution turned full circle. Aurangzib, the puritanical and unlovable son of Shahjahan, slew two of his brothers, exiled a third, and in 1658 imprisoned his father, who was confined in the Agra Fort ‘under the special care of a tyrannical eunuch, who frequently gratified the malice of his perverted nature by inflicting petty indignities upon the captive monarch’.

Although such a dynasty could not endure, it might have lingered for some generations yet but for the operation of two factors. In the first place, under Aurangzib, most of Southern India was for the first time effectively added to the Mughal Empire. The extension was a fatal source of weakness. It is open to doubt even today, with all our modern means of communication, whether the Indian continent, including what is now Pakistan, could be maintained as a unitary state. It is at least certain that any such achievement was impossible at a time when it took an army many weeks to march from Delhi to Southern India. The experiment had indeed been tried several times previously, notably under one of the pre-Mughal Muslim rulers of Delhi; but each time it had failed, and it was destined to fail equally under Aurangzib and his feeble successors. The attempt strained to breaking point the resources of the Mughals, weakened the empire at its centre, and so led to open revolt on the part of the powerful viceroys of some of the great provinces. This fact was, of course, not without significance in connection with the problem that the British Government had to face before agreeing to the partition of India in 1947—and we shall return to it later. The second cause of collapse was the puritanical and aggressive intolerance of the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzib. He completely reversed the policy of Akbar. His narrow Islamic zeal bitterly alienated the Rajputs, who were rightly regarded as the finest Hindu soldiers of the day, and destroyed any hope of their rallying effectively to the help of the emperor against the other great Hindu confederacy—that of the Marathas—now growing rapidly in power. Those hardy warriors from the mountains of Western India showed a mobility and a tactical skill new in Indian history; to this they added daring, together with a complete mastery of all the arts of intrigue. Aided by the Rajputs, the Mughals might have withstood the Marathas, but, having thrown away that aid by their own intolerance, Aurangzib and his successors were sorely tried and shaken by the new foe. The resulting weakness of the empire gave fresh opportunities for provincial viceroys and governors to declare their independence, and disintegration was rapid. The final blow was given by the invasions of Persians and Afghans in the middle of the eighteenth century. Thereafter, the Mughal Empire was in the throes of dissolution; anarchy and chaos reigned everywhere, law and order were no longer maintained, and throughout India adventurers began to carve new kingdoms for themselves out of the old imperial territories. Henceforth, the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong.

Throughout all these political changes, all India, except the extreme south, had thus been subjected continuously for seven centuries before Plassey to Muslim influence, in degrees of intensity which varied from time to time and from place to place. There were two schools of Islamic thought regarding the treatment of non-Muslim subjects. According to the stricter school, every weapon of the state should be used to bring about the conversion of the infidel, who must indeed be offered only the choice of Islam or death. Such an extreme principle naturally had to be considerably modified in practice, particularly when the infidel subjects so greatly outnumbered the Muslim conquerors, and the actual treatment of the Hindus at any given time depended largely on the character of the emperor and the security of his throne. During part of this period, indeed, Hindus constituted an important element in the Mughal armies, and held great tracts of land as virtually independent Rajas, subject only to the payment of tribute. When the Mughals under Timur invaded India after their conversion to Islam, one of their main pretexts was the desire to punish the Muslim kings of Delhi for their leniency towards the Hindu idolaters; the pretext need not be taken too seriously, but the leniency may be assumed to have been real and well-known. In Akbar’s time such liberality became a principle of statecraft.

On the other hand, we read more frequently of periods when the Hindus suffered extreme persecution, and the annals of the Muslims are full of bloodthirsty gloating over the wholesale massacre and oppression of infidels. The Jizya or poll-tax on non-Muslims was a marked feature of Muslim rule. Even in the reign of one of the best of the early Muslim kings of Delhi, Muhammad Tughlaq, it was laid down as a matter of state policy that the Hindus must not be allowed to amass wealth. The reason for this policy may have been political rather than religious, but that can have been of little comfort to the Hindus, and it may safely be said that during most of the Muslim period the Hindus suffered a considerable degree of oppression.

This steady pressure naturally produced large-scale conversions during the long period of Muslim rule. Forcible conversion was by no means uncommon, but far more numerous were the cases where the Hindu individual or community recognised either the obvious advantages of adopting the faith of the ruler or the impossibility of holding out indefinitely against Muslim pressure. Conversion was not, however, the only factor tending to increase the Muslim element in the population, for the wealth and fame of the court at Delhi continually attracted new Muslim immigrants from the homes of the original invaders, while mixed marriages were fairly frequent and the resulting offspring were brought up as Muslims. No statistical study of the process is possible, but it is clear that it was continuous and that long before the commencement of British rule the third layer of population had been well established. As for the first layer, the Dravidians had long been absorbed into the Hindu system, and except for the Untouchables, eighteenth-century India stood sharply divided between Hindus and Muslims. The feelings between them were much what could be expected, since one community had been dominant, and the other subject, and often, though not always, oppressed. What is today called communal dissension was thus the permanent and inevitable legacy of centuries of Muslim rule.

Chapter III

The New Crusade — The Portuguese and the Dutch

Unlike China, India never sought to isolate herself behind a ‘Great Wall’, nor was she at any time cut off from commercial and cultural contact with the outside world. From the earliest classical times the West hankered after the spices, precious stones and ivory of India, and the demand for these commodities was stimulated by the growth of the cities first of Egypt, then of Greece and later of Rome. Payment was normally made in bullion and the trade assumed such proportions that some contemporary observers were seriously alarmed by the drain on Western resources. Thus Pliny tells us that the annual drain to India from the Roman Empire was about fifty-five millions of sesterces (£500,000) and that the commodities bought from India were sold in Rome at one hundred times their original cost.

This great trade was not directly conducted either by Indian or Western merchants, but was in the hands of those Semitic races who lived along the principal trade routes. Sir William Hunter in his fascinating book A History of British India shows vividly that much of Biblical history—and in particular the expansionist policy of David and Solomon—must be regarded as part of the struggle for the lands through which ran the caravan routes from India. That struggle, indeed, provided the one thread of unity in the disjointed and bewildering early history of the Middle East.

The oldest of the three main trade routes from India was certainly in use before the foundation of Rome. Many races played their part in its operation. Indian traders took their goods by sea along the coasts of India and what is now Baluchistan to the Persian Gulf. There Babylonian merchants bought their merchandise and sent it by Arab caravans across the desert to Syria and thence to Egypt or Phoenicia. Phoenician merchants completed the chain of distribution and sold the merchandise of India in the markets of the Mediterranean. As time passed, the great mercantile cities of Italy took an ever-growing share in this trade, and the Crusades, by bringing them into closer touch with Constantinople and the East, stimulated it. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, the Mongols overran most of Asia, seized the territories of the Khilafat, and made the Syrian trade route so hazardous that for a time it ceased to be used.

The second route had the advantage of avoiding the dangers of the Indian Ocean, but involved a long, laborious and often unsafe journey across the mighty mountains between India and the River Oxus. Thence the route led to the Caspian and on to the Black Sea, and at an early date Constantinople was established as the main distributing centre for this trade. Genoese and Venetian merchants long contended for the control of this channel of supply, but the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 led to the abandonment of this route.

The third route—by sea from India to Egypt—remained open for some time after the capture of Constantinople, but the Turks gradually established their ascendancy in the Middle East. Their seizure of Egypt in 1516–17 completed the process by which they secured control of the old Indo-European trade routes.

All the three trade routes from India were thus, at any rate for a time, completely blocked, and the source of wealth which had continued throughout the Middle Ages was at an end. The cities of Italy were the first to feel the loss, but the shock to the entire economy of Europe was severe, for the Indian trade had played an important part in the elaborately organised distributing system which had grown up on the Continent.

It was inevitable that Christendom should seek to recover this trade, and, as it happened, the circumstances of the age were in some respects particularly favourable to such an attempt. Three factors were to condition the struggle. Perhaps the most important of them was that great upsurge of the human spirit so happily called the Renaissance. Once again was born the old Greek spirit of wonder and the desire to explore all mysteries in heaven or earth. Customary limits, long taken for granted, now seemed cramping and irksome, and everywhere astronomers, geographers and navigators set to work to enlarge the boundaries of the known world. This spirit of exploration was to show Europe a new way to the riches of the East.

The second source of inspiration was the militant spirit of Christianity at the close of the Middle Ages. The Crusade for the Holy Places had taken on the wider character of a great struggle between the Cross and the Crescent, and the War against the Moors had fired the imagination of the people of Southern Europe. The discovery of the Cape route to India opened a new phase of this conflict in the Indian Ocean and provided a genuine idealistic impulse for an enterprise which, in its other aspects, was largely commercial. After the Reformation, the same religious militancy, combined with a sound appreciation of the value of the Eastern trade, animated the Protestant English and Dutch in their fight with Catholic Portugal for the supremacy of the East.

Nascent nationalism provided the third element in the struggle. The mediaeval cities, which had hitherto been the parties mainly interested in the Indian trade, could never have provided the resources of man-power necessary for the conquest of the East. Such an enterprise had to await the growth of the new nation-states of Europe. In Tudor England nationalism was a vital force, and the confident belief of Elizabethan seamen and warriors that one Englishman was as good as a dozen Spaniards was the firm foundation of expansion and imperialism. Similar forces were at work in Holland, while in Spain and Portugal the successful fight against the Moors had developed a strong national pride.

These three spiritual forces—the thirst for new knowledge, religious zeal and new-born patriotism—produced in sixteenth-century Europe a widespread spirit of adventure, which played much the same part in the new age that chivalry had fulfilled in the Middle Ages. Unlike chivalry, however, it broke across the barriers of class and animated the ordinary seaman as much as the soldier-poet of the age. Any interpretation of the new yearning after the East which ignored this spirit of adventure would be as false as one which neglected the profit motive. The profits were indeed great for those who survived the hazardous journey to India, but the risks were appalling, and it is unlikely that many men would have faced them for gold alone if adventure had not been also in the air.

The fight with the Moors had induced in the Portuguese a state of national exaltation, and they would perhaps in any case have been the first in the Eastern field. Their position was, however, assured by the vision and tenacity of Prince Henry the Navigator. The tradition of a passage round Africa to India had lingered from classical times, but was generally disbelieved by mediaeval mariners and geographers, who were convinced that a few hundred miles down the African coast ‘a shoal stretched out to sea, over which the water foamed and boiled’. Prince Henry, who was actuated equally by a passion for maritime exploration, by political hatred of the Moors, and by an unquenchable desire to convert the world to Christianity, pinned his faith to the ancient tradition. In 1418 he established himself near Cape St. Vincent and devoted his life to the exploration of the West African coast. In the words of Sir William Hunter: ‘On that barren spur of rocks and shifting sands and stunted juniper, with the roar of the ocean for ever in his ears, and the wide Atlantic before him inviting discovery from sunrise to sunset, he spent his remaining forty-two years, a man of one high aim, without wife or child. Amid its solitudes he built the first observatory in Portugal, established a naval arsenal, and founded a school for navigation, marine mathematics and chart making. Thither he invited the most skilful pilots and scientific sailors of Christendom. . . . Thence, too, he sent forth at brief intervals exploring expeditions into the unknown South: expeditions often unfruitful, sometimes calamitous, even denounced as folly and waste, but which won the African coast as an outlying empire for Portugal.’ Progress was slow, and by the time of Prince Henry’s death in 1460 exploration had still not reached as far as the Gulf of Guinea. Great developments in the sciences of navigation and geography had, however, taken place, and the rapidity of subsequent discoveries was largely due to his genius and singleness of purpose.

New lands were thus being opened to Christendom, and it was necessary to determine their legal ownership. The pope, as the accepted authority on international questions of this kind, issued a series of bulls, which were modified in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal. The general effect was to allot to Portugal all lands ‘discovered or to be discovered and not occupied by any Christian prince’ east of a line which was never exactly demarcated, but which lay west of the Cape Verd Islands. East Africa, India and the Spice Islands were all to fall within the Portuguese sphere.

For nearly a hundred years this settlement was accepted by Christendom as legally binding, and, secure in the strength of it, Portugal pushed rapidly ahead. In 1486 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope with two ships of fifty tons each—and something of the hardships and suffering involved can be faintly guessed from his graphic naming of that promontory ‘Cabo Tormentoso’. Twelve years later, Vasco da Gama, in a fleet of three ships with one hundred and sixty sailors, landed at Calicut on the Malabar coast and so realised the life-long dream of Prince Henry.

Portuguese exploration and commerce in the East were financed and inspired, from start to finish, not by business men or by the Legislature, but by the Crown and the Royal Family. Prince Henry had devoted the whole of his own fortune to the task of exploration, while the expedition of da Gama was possible only because of the backing of the king. The Council of State condemned the project roundly, and the populace gathered on the shore at the mouth of the Tagus to call down curses on the madmen who were embarking on such a venture. Popular feeling gave no support to the early Portuguese adventurers in the East.

A second characteristic of Portuguese expansion and conquest in the East is that it never ceased to be linked with a fanatical missionary spirit. The Portuguese hoped to found a great Indian Christian Empire, and in the process were to oppress the Muslims without mercy. In the words of the official Portuguese historian Barros: ‘The Moors and Gentiles are outside the law of Jesus Christ, which is the true law that everyone has to keep under pain of damnation to eternal fire. If then the soul be so condemned, what right has the body to the privilege of our laws? It is true they are reasoning beings and might, if they lived, be converted to the true faith, but inasmuch as they have not shown any desire as yet to accept this, we Christians have no duties towards them.’ This principle led the Portuguese to perpetrate great cruelty in India and to build up intense hatred of themselves in many places.

The King of Portugal lost no time after the voyage of da Gama in securing papal permission to style himself by the impressive title of ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopa, Arabia, Persia and India’, and in order that the title might be a reality sent out numerous naval and commercial expeditions.

The time and place of the first Portuguese landings were very favourable to their success. The great Mughal Empire had not yet come into being, and the Kingdom of Delhi, out of the ruins of which that empire was to grow, was in the last stages of disintegration. The two great powers of Southern India—the Muslim Bahmani kingdom and Hindu Vijayanagar—were involved in a life-and-death struggle and had little attention to spare for the doings of the petty rajas who ruled the small principalities between the Western Ghats and the Malabar coast. The Portuguese, who could have done little against a greater power, were able to deal on more than equal terms with these minor princes, whose territories were nevertheless important as centres of the trade with the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

The ports of the Malabar coast were shipping centres for the pepper and ginger of the interior, as well as places of transhipment for the spices of the Far East. The principal exporters from Calicut and the neighbouring towns were Moplahs, that is to say, Arabs who had in former days settled down in Malabar as traders, while the shipping was in the hands of Arab and Egyptian merchants. The determination of the Portuguese to capture this lucrative commerce thus received sanction and inspiration from their fierce crusading zeal. The Moplahs were quick to realise the threat, and the early Portuguese attacks upon Arab ships near Calicut set the seal upon the enmity between the Muslims and the Portuguese. The indigenous Malabar Muslims, who were converts from Hinduism with no Arabian connections, did not share this initial hatred, but were soon included by the Portuguese in the same general condemnation as infidels.

The Hindu Zamorin of Calicut and his Hindu officials saw no reason to be unfriendly to those who came seeking to purchase their products, but the arrogance of the Portuguese, together with pressure from the Moplahs, soon led to trouble. The Portuguese then made overtures to the rulers of Cochin, Cannanore, and other Malabar ports. In due course—and after they had defeated a great Egyptian fleet under Admiral Emir Hussain—they established a port of their own at Goa, and acquired a firm ascendancy over the Malabar coast. By 1509 the Muslim power in the Indian Ocean was broken.

It is not necessary for our purpose to follow in further detail the history of the Portuguese in India. Two general aspects of their policy nevertheless require notice. The first of these is their development of the technique of intervention in local disputes and of alliances with certain rajas against their enemies. This was the technique which Britain and France were to utilise with greater effect two centuries later. The second important feature of their policy is that they never at any stage became a great territorial power. They did indeed, in spite of the advice of their first Viceroy, acquire fortified bases on the coast, but they did not penetrate inland. What little territorial influence they may have acquired in the first half of the sixteenth century disappeared wholly with the firm establishment of the Mughal Empire.

Two minor features of their administration, which were to be reproduced by other colonial powers in the East at a later date, were their use of native troops and their encouragement of mixed marriages—presumably as a means of spreading the Catholic faith.

For nearly a hundred years, protected by the legal exclusion of other Christian nations from the East, they dominated the Indian Ocean and reaped both glory and profit from the Eastern trade. By the middle of the sixteenth century, however, decline had begun. Even if the Portuguese had retained their initial energy and ideals, the resources of their country could not have maintained a vast overseas empire indefinitely. In fact, however, demoralisation at home synchronised with rapid degeneration in the East. Served by slaves and contemptuous of the local population, the Portuguese in India soon began to despise labour and to regard sloth and luxuriousness as their natural prerogative. A loosening of moral fibre was the result, and as early as 1545 St. Francis Xavier could write that ‘there is here a power which I may call irresistible, to thrust men headlong into the abyss, where besides the seductions of gain and the easy opportunities of plunder, their appetites for greed will be sharpened by having tasted it, and there will be a whole torrent of low examples and evil customs to overwhelm them and sweep them away. . . . Everywhere and at all times, it is rapine, hoarding and robbery’. This decline in private morality was accompanied by universal corruption in the public services, which grew steadily worse during the century.

After the Union with Spain in 1580 deterioration was still more rapid. The increased fanaticism which resulted from Spanish influence in the Eastern affairs of the Portuguese still further alienated the princes of the coasts of India, and at the same time the unsoundness of the Spanish finances meant that adequate support for the Indian enterprise was never forthcoming. Moreover, the position of Portugal in the East had always depended on her command of the seas. The rise of the Protestant maritime powers and the decisive defeat of Spain made the continuance of that position impossible. A few more years of grace were given by reason of Elizabeth’s caution and James’s policy of friendship for Spain, but once the period of English hesitation was over the virtual exclusion of the Portuguese from the East was rapid. The naval victories of Best and Downton, off Swally, in 1612 and 1615, not only struck an effective blow at the declining Portuguese power but also convinced the Mughals that the English newcomers were a force with which they must reckon. The Dutch, who had now appeared on the scene, completed the task of destroying Portuguese influence in India, and in the middle of the century drove them from the ports of Malabar.

In this brief sketch of Portuguese history we have seen, firstly, that their position in India depended on decisive command of the seas; secondly that alliances with local princes and the establishment of Portuguese influence on land were possible only while the ruling power at Delhi was weak; thirdly that religious intolerance made it unlikely that their power would endure; and, finally, that in the absence of any effective public opinion at home corruption grew alarmingly amongst the Portuguese in India and soon undermined their strength.

Similar principles would emerge from a study of the later attempts of other European nations to establish a position in India. In the case of the Dutch, who came next, it will not be necessary to go into detail, for, in the first place, India was always subsidiary to the Malay Archipelago in Dutch Eastern policy, and, secondly, the experience of Holland added only one further lesson to those enumerated above.

Throughout the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century the English and the Dutch alike felt constrained to obey the papal bulls which had assigned Eastern discoveries to Portugal. They were, however, quite prepared to find legal means of evading them, and for this purpose they made strenuous attempts to discover a North-West or a North-East Passage to India. The rise of Protestantism naturally weakened respect for papal authority in international affairs, and when the Union of Spain and Portugal in 1580 almost shut England and Holland out of the Eastern commerce which passed through Lisbon it was clear that those two countries, now developing maritime strength, would begin to attack the Portuguese position in the East. England still delayed for a few years, and the Dutch were first in the field. Certain Dutchmen had served in Goa under the Portuguese, and their reports of the Portuguese situation in India provided the needed stimulus. Between 1595 and 1601 fifteen Dutch fleets sailed for the East. These were, in the main, private ventures, but the Dutch Government soon stepped in, insisted on a monopolistic union of all the companies, and itself exerted a considerable measure of control. This combination of private capital with government direction was characteristic of all Dutch Eastern enterprise.

The early Dutch efforts were concentrated in the Malay Archipelago, and for reasons which are outside the scope of this book they succeeded in ousting the English from that region. India, which then became the main field of English endeavours, was principally important to the Dutch as a source of supply for the cloth which was in such demand in the Spice Islands.

The motives of Holland were wholly different from those which had led Portugal to the East. She was animated primarily neither by proselytising zeal nor by desire for empire. Trade was her main aim, but she believed that her trading interests demanded a complete monopoly of the external commerce of the Spice Islands; and, not unnaturally, she soon found that in practice this necessitated political domination. She was not originally interested in ruling the local populations and was glad to leave them and their princes alone as long as they did not interfere with her trade. Often, however, she found it necessary to fight in order to maintain her trading rights, and this she was always willing to do. Commercial monopoly was her guiding principle.

In pursuance of this policy, from 1605 onwards the Dutch began to found trading posts on the Coromandel coast. One of these posts, at Pulicat near Madras, was fortified by permission of the Raja of Vellor; it rapidly became a haven of safety in the dynastic struggles then proceeding in the Carnatic, and had the Dutch been so minded, it might well have become ‘a centre of Dutch territorial power’. In 1616 they founded a factory at Surat on the Malabar coast. Later in the century, acting on their determination to exclude other nations from trading in competition with them, they successfully attacked Cochin and destroyed the Portuguese trade and authority on the Malabar coast. This Dutch policy of commercial exclusiveness may have been wise in the Archipelago, where they had the military strength to enforce it; in India, where the Dutch never maintained any great force, it was bound to prove disastrous. The English at that time, perhaps more conscious of their limitations, relied on diplomacy more than on force. They cultivated friendly relations with the Mughal representative at Surat, and made an amicable arrangement with the Portuguese in Goa. The Dutch, on the other hand, broke down the Portuguese monopoly by force. Their methods proved expensive, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, in spite of the satisfactory trading profit, the deficit on total account was substantial. More important still, the attitude of the Dutch provoked apprehension and antagonism, and when, at the end of the seventeenth century, England began to rely more on force, the threat to the Dutch was obvious. In 1759 they suffered a disastrous defeat by the English in Bengal, and in 1780 they not only lost Negapatam but were also compelled to admit English commerce freely to the Archipelago. The policy of commercial exclusiveness, not backed by adequate force, had failed, and from that time onward Holland ceased to count in Indian affairs.

Chapter IV

The East India Company

By the middle of the sixteenth century the English had become a great seafaring people. They were in a boisterous, rollicking mood, ready to sail anywhere and fight anybody for the sake of adventure, love of England and profit. Henry VIII, who perhaps understood the spirit and the moods of his people better than any other English sovereign, built dockyards and ships and laid the foundations of the English navy. By the time of Elizabeth England had become the chief naval power of the world, though she still counted for little on land. All modern authorities agree that at this time England not only had the best sailors and the best ships in the world but that she excelled all other nations in the science of naval gunnery and in understanding of the value of the broadside. Moreover, although the Royal Navy was small, merchantmen and pirates were always ready to co-operate against the hated foreigner. As for her people, Fisher tells us that ‘they were proud of England and their Queen. They despised foreigners. They hated the Pope, the Turk and the Devil, but perhaps most of all the Pope, who had allotted the East Indies to Portugal and the West Indies to Spain’.

A people in such a mood, and conscious of their naval strength, could not long be held back from eastern adventures. Elizabeth, indeed, for reasons of high and wise policy, restrained them for a time, but when the exploits of that great and lovable pirate Sir Francis Drake had stirred the blood of Englishmen everywhere—and when, too, the defeat of the Armada had made England safe—she gave rein to the national impulse and allowed the first English squadron to sail for the Far East. Three ships set out in April 1591 under the command of George Raymond. One had to return with those who had fallen sick of the scurvy, a second was lost in a great storm, but the third, under Captain Lancaster, touched Cape Comorin, reached Malaya, and returned by Ceylon and the Cape. After a voyage of almost incredible hardship, during which they were blown from the West Indies to Newfoundland and back again, of the one hundred and ninety-eight men who set out with Captain Lancaster only twenty-five reached home safely. Commercially, however, the voyage had been a great success, and Captain Lancaster’s ship brought back a valuable cargo. For most men in ordinary times this voyage would have been enough, but the temper of the age was heroic, and a few years later Captain Lancaster commanded the first fleet of the East India Company.

The next expedition ended in disaster. Three ships—the Bear, the Bear’s Whelp, and the Benjamin—left England in 1596 under the command of Captain Benjamin Wood; they reached Goa, captured two Portuguese ships on the way to China, and then suffered so severely from scurvy that insufficient men were left to handle them. Not a man returned from the venture.

In the meantime, stirring news had come from two daring travellers, an Englishman and a Dutchman. In 1583 four Englishmen—Ralph Fitch and John Newberie, merchants of London; William Leedes, a jeweller, and James Story, a painter, ‘being desirous to see the countries of the East India’ and financed by certain London merchants—set out for the Near East in the Tiger and provided the basis for a line from Shakespeare known to every schoolboy:

Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger.

From Aleppo they travelled via Babylon and Basra to Ormuz, and, this last-named city being under the control of the Portuguese, they were arrested as spies at the instigation of a rival Italian merchant and sent to Goa, the Portuguese headquarters in India. Here they were released, thanks to the friendly efforts of the Dutch Secretary of the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa. Two of them remained permanently in India, and one perhaps died on the way home, but Fitch, after wandering with observant eyes for eight years through India, Burma, Malaya and Ceylon, returned to England in 1591 with a story of a ‘brave and pleasant country and very fruitful’ which inflamed the enthusiasm of his countrymen.

Soon after this the Dutchman, Linschoten, who had befriended Fitch and his companions, published his Itinerario, which was translated into English almost at once and which held out a glowing picture not only of the riches of the East but also of the vulnerability of the Portuguese. If any further stimulus were required, it was provided by the news that the Dutch had bought English ships for their Eastern enterprise. National pride was badly stung. In 1599 all these forces produced their inevitable results, and a number of English merchants, including particularly those who had financed the Levant Company, met together to found a new company.

Political delays occurred, but in 1600 the East India Company received its charter and made up for loss of time by the vigour with which it went about the business of buying and equipping its first fleet of five ships. The flagship was the Red Dragon, of six hundred tons, and so urgent was the work of refitting considered that the shipwrights were provided with free beer ‘so that they leave not their work to run to the alehouse’.

The sense of urgency was not on account of India but of the Far East, for the Company’s first two voyages were to Sumatra; and it was not until 1607, on the Company’s third voyage, that Captain Hawkins landed at Surat and attempted to lay the foundations of the Indian trade. The commodity mainly sought by the East India Company was spice, and it so happened that the Spice Islands of the Archipelago furnished the valuable cinnamon and cloves, while only the inferior spices were produced in India. Two factors, however, in due course impelled us to India in preference to the Far East. The first was the effective occupation of the Archipelago by the Portuguese and the Dutch, while the second was linked with current English economic theory. Contemporary economists disapproved of the export of silver and held that foreign trade must in each case be based on the export of manufactured goods. There was no market for English goods in the Archipelago, whereas India did provide such a market to a limited extent, and also furnished commodities which were acceptable in the Spice Islands. It is possible, therefore, that even without the humiliation of Amboyna in 1623 and the connected episode India would ultimately have become the main theatre of the East India Company’s enterprise.

In India, as in the Far East, the Company had to face the determined hostility of the Portuguese and the Dutch. In 1607 Captain Hawkins, in command of the Company’s third venture, arrived at Surat and began to trade. He soon realised that it was essential to enlist the favour of the Mughal emperor, and for this purpose set out in 1608 on the wearisome two-months’ journey to the imperial court at Agra. A talent for conviviality stood him in good stead with the Emperor Jahangir, and he secured a permit to establish a ‘factory’ or trading station at Surat. The Portuguese thereupon intrigued successfully against him and the permit was revoked. The Company, nevertheless, continued to trade, though without a ‘factory’ or establishment, and the resolute action taken by Sir Henry Middleton against Indian trading vessels, followed by Captain Best’s complete defeat of a strong Portuguese naval squadron off Swally in 1612 in an action watched from the coast by a large number of Indian soldiers and officials, greatly raised the prestige of the English. This induced a change in the attitude of the Surat merchants, who up to this time, though anxious to trade with the newcomers, had been unduly fearful of antagonising the Portuguese, and in 1613 an agreement with the authorities at Surat was approved by the emperor. A permanent ‘factory’ was established at Surat, and a representative of the Company was stationed in Agra to watch over its interests at court.

Sir Thomas Roe was sent out in 1615 as Ambassador from the King of England, and his efforts resulted in a more comprehensive agreement with Prince Khurram, son of Jahangir and Viceroy of that region of India which included Surat. By 1619 there were English ‘factories’ at Surat, Broach, Agra and Ahmadabad. The policy which was to govern the relations of the East India Company with the rulers of India for three-quarters of a century was thus laid down by Sir Thomas Roe before his departure in 1619. ‘It is the beggaring of Portugal, notwithstanding his many rich residences and territories, that he keeps soldiers that spends it; yet his garrisons are mean. He never profited by the Indies since he defended them. Observe this well. It hath been also the error of the Dutch, who seek plantation here by the sword. They turn a wonderful stock, they prowl in all places, they possess some of the best; yet their dead payes consume all their gain. Let this be received as a rule: that if you will profit, seek it at sea, and in quiet trade: for without controversy it is an error to affect Garrisons and Land wars in India.’

These observations regarding the Dutch were fully borne out by events on the west coast. Shortly after the arrival of Sir Thomas Roe in India the Dutch secured permission to trade at Surat; there they soon proved their own worst enemies. The truculence and aggressiveness which had perhaps served them well in their dealings with the petty rulers of the Spice Islands were entirely unsuited to relations with the Mughal Empire at the zenith of its power. For a while the dislike inspired by the Dutch harmed the English, too, inasmuch as it involved them as Europeans, in the same general condemnation. The Mughal Government, however, soon learned to discriminate between the different European nations who were seeking to establish themselves in India. In the first place, ‘it ceased’, in the words of Sir William Hunter, ‘to confound the peaceable English with the Portuguese, who prostrated themselves like Hindus before a tinsel goddess, and plundered the True Believers on the holy voyage to Mecca’. Soon, too, the Mughal officers came to distinguish between the attitude of the English, which was based on a desire to secure the friendship of the rulers of the country, and that of the Dutch, who preferred to rely on their own nuisance value. The difference between the two approaches may have been due partly to the fact that the English, as private traders, with little effective support from home, were always conscious of their own weakness, whereas the Dutch were in a very real sense the representatives of the Dutch Government and thus felt able to adopt a high tone. There can be no doubt that the English attitude was based on a sounder assessment of the position and that, combined with the lack of any fanatical desire on the part of the English to proselytise, it weighed powerfully in their favour in the struggle for commercial supremacy in India.

In the early part of the century, in spite of the bitter hostility between the English and the Dutch in the Far East, they tended in India to combine against the Portuguese. As time passed, however, the power of the Portuguese declined, and the Dutch became the more dangerous competitors to the English. The Company therefore realigned itself and a temporary truce with the Portuguese, made in 1635, was in practice permanent. This opened the important Portuguese ports of the Malabar coast to the Company. The Dutch continued to harass the Portuguese, and by 1663 had expelled them from all settlements on the west coast south of Goa. By then the East India Company was too strongly established on the west coast to be driven out, and so the struggle between Holland and Portugal resulted in a clear gain to the Company.

In the second half of the seventeenth century the most important event on the west coast was the establishment of the Company in Bombay. That city formed part of the dower of Catherine of Braganz when she married Charles II of England, but it had attached to it the condition that England should assist in the defence of the Portuguese Indian possessions against the Dutch. In reality it was part of the realignment of the English policy in India, to which reference has been made. There was much about Bombay that was unattractive; it cost the king more than it brought in by way of revenue, and Charles, who was perhaps not in a position to take long views, transferred it to the East India Company for a quit rent of £10 a year. The Company looked further ahead than Charles, and realised the potential importance of Bombay, by reason of its position and its fine natural harbour facilities.

A few years later, under the direction of one of the most imaginative and far-sighted of the English pioneers in the East, Gerald Aungier, Bombay began to grow rapidly in importance. The merchants of Surat were at first unwilling to settle there. They had no trust in the promises held out to them by the Company’s representatives in India that Bombay would be a permanent establishment, but asked for a guarantee from the Company in England, whose ordinances, they said, ‘are always of force’. They were presumably satisfied, for they soon began to establish agencies in Bombay. Aungier applied himself, with almost inexhaustible energy, to the varied tasks of draining swamps, building a hospital, raising a militia, and reforming the revenue, and with all this on hand he still found time to study the manners and customs of the Hindus. The climate of Bombay proved unhealthy, and the English died like flies. A contemporary observer tells us that ‘of every five hundred Europeans who came to live upon the Island not one hundred ever left it’. Nevertheless, Aungier’s energy and understanding bore fruit, and Bombay became a thriving centre of commerce. Within twenty years it trebled its population, and in 1687 it was made the headquarters of the Company’s administration on the west coast, in place of Surat.

In the meantime, important developments had been taking place on the Coromandel or eastern coast of India. There the Dutch had forestalled the English and had founded factories at Masulipatam in 1605 and at Pulicat, twenty miles north of the future site of Madras, in 1610. Attempts by English seamen in 1611 and 1614 to share in the trade at Pulicat were foiled by the Dutch and even when the Treaty of 1619 gave the East India Company the right to participate in it the Dutch were able to prevent the exercise of this right. Fortunately the same enterprising seaman who made the first unsuccessful attempt at Pulicat went further north, and after selecting a site at Pettapoli, which afterwards proved too unhealthy to be maintained, went on to Masulipatam, just north of the estuary of the River Kistna. That place was in many respects unattractive; it lacked good shipping facilities, and the Dutch were already established there. It was, however, an excellent centre for the purchase of the calico which was in such demand in the Far East, and a lucrative trade sprang up at once.

India south of the Vindhya mountains had not at this time been brought under the rule of the Mughals and was in a state of confusion. The great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar had been finally defeated and broken up by the Muslim King of Golkonda in 1565. Many of the rulers who had been subordinate to the Raja of Vijayanagar, retained a good deal of their former semi-independence and a continual struggle was in progress between them and their new overlord. In the south the local rulers perhaps counted for as much as the King of Golkonda; whereas in the region of Masulipatam, although the Hindu rajas had a good deal of power, in the last resort the will of Golkonda was likely to prevail. The English and the Dutch thus had to compete for the favour of the rajas and of the King of Golkonda. On the whole the English played this game more successfully than the Dutch, who never seem to have realised that the power of Golkonda was growing year by year at the expense of the rajas. The Company took care to be well represented at the court of Golkonda, and as a general rule managed to keep on good terms with the king of that great kingdom.

In 1639, thanks to the enterprise of one of its servants, who in the traditional style was severely rebuked for his initiative, the East India Company obtained a small grant of territory from a local raja and built thereon a fortified factory known as Fort St. George, or Madras. As is well known, Madras was the first piece of territory—as distinct from mere land on which to build a factory—acquired by the English in India, and it is significant that it was obtained by negotiation and through friendship with a local ruler. In 1645 our satisfactory relations with his overlord stood us in good stead, for the grant was renewed and confirmed by the King of Golkonda, who, indeed, at one stage embarrassed the Company by a desire to take shares in it. In 1658 Madras became the headquarters of all the Company’s establishment in Eastern India. Twenty-nine years later the Mughal emperor subjugated the kingdom of Golkonda and thus became the overlord of the Company.

In Bengal, too, the Dutch were in the field before the East India Company. They began in 1627 with a settlement at Pipli, but soon abandoned this for Balasore, in Orissa. In the course of the next thirty years they founded important and profitable factories at Kasimbazar, Patna and Chinsura and at the latter place were allowed to construct a fortress. They had to contend with endless harassment and extortion from the local officials, but the trade was profitable and could stand these incidental losses.

The story of the first English venture to Bengal is typical of the methods by which the Company’s position was established. In 1630 the Company had obtained from the King of Golkonda a document, with the king’s seal impressed upon a leaf of gold, in which ‘of his great love to the valiant and honourable Captain Joyce and all the English’ he granted to the English that ‘under the shadow of me the King they shall set down at rest and in safety’. The English agent whose enterprise had secured this grant was rebuked by his superiors, but in 1633, on the strength of the Golden Farman, the first British expedition to Bengal was undertaken. Expedition is perhaps too high-sounding a name for a party of eight Englishmen who set sail in a primitive native junk ‘with a high poop like a thatched house built in it for a cabin’ and made their slow and hazardous way to the coast of Orissa. They were well received by the raja, but soon a Portuguese frigate appeared on the scene—and but for the protection of the raja that would have been the end of the adventure. Thereafter Ralph Cartwright, the Chief Merchant, so impressed the Governor of Orissa by his confidence and fearless speech that he secured a full licence to trade, with the right to bring disputes personally to the governor ‘because the English may have no wrong’. Every incident in this episode illustrates the individual initiative and confidence, combined with full readiness to respect authority, which were characteristic of the English in India at this period. The story is told with intense vividness in Bruton’s News from the East Indies.

Settlements at Hariharpur and Balasore soon followed, but malaria, dysentery and Portuguese pirates wrought havoc, and, moreover, Orissa proved to be a poor market for the goods which the Company had to sell. A new settlement at Hugli in 1650 turned out much better and, with the official blessing of the Mughal Viceroy of Bengal, ultimately became one of the most important and profitable of the Company’s stations. Factories were established at Patna (in modern Bihar), at Kasimbazar, Maida and Rajmahal, and also at Dacca in East Bengal, long noted for its muslins. So important was the silk industry of Bengal to the Company that experts were brought from England to improve the methods of manufacture. The trade grew rapidly and by 1680 the annual investment of the Company in Bengal is said to have risen to £150,000.

Difficult times were nevertheless at hand. An arrangement by which the Company compounded with the Viceroy Shah Shuja for exemption from all customs duties in return for an annual payment was soon disregarded by his rapacious successor, Shaista Khan. An appeal was made to the Emperor Aurangzib, and was decided in favour of the Company; but the Bengal authorities were to a great extent independent of Delhi at this time, and, though they never in terms repudiated the decision of the emperor, they did not scruple to interpret it as they pleased. In endeavouring to restrict the operation of the grant, the local officials had at least the justification that a prodigious amount of trade was being carried on by the Company’s servants on their own private account, under cover of the permit to the Company. In reality, however, moral factors counted for nothing in this contest. The temporary stability established in Northern India by Akbar and partially maintained by his two immediate successors was beginning to break down. There was nobody with whom any binding settlement could be made, and it soon became clear that either the Company must be prepared to submit indefinitely to endless exactions from the local authorities or else it must put itself in a position to offer military resistance.

In the meantime ‘the Bengal Viceroy could oppress the infidels without fear and he did so without mercy’. The correspondence between the Company and its officers throughout the century makes the pacific intentions of the Company abundantly clear, but at last they were convinced that they must follow the Dutch policy of the strong right arm. A despatch in 1686 sets forth the definite conclusion that ‘the Moghul officers are trampling on us and extorting what they please of our estate from us, by the besieging of our Factories and stopping of our boats upon the Ganges; they will never forbare doing so until we have made them as sensible of our Power, as we have of our truth and justice’.

This modification of the policy of Sir Thomas Roe which had been followed since the foundation of the Company, was not due solely to events in Bengal. In Bombay also the Company had fallen on troublesome times. Whereas the Company’s earlier settlement at Surat was situated in a region under the undisputed control of the Mughal emperor, Bombay was an important theatre of war between the Mughals and the Marathas in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. No authority there could guarantee peace or even grant any effective privileges, and the Company’s officials found themselves faced with the hopeless task of preserving tolerable relations with both sides, while at the same time defending themselves from the depredations of the Malabar pirates, who at this time were particularly active. After twenty years’ resistance to Maratha attacks the Company’s representatives at Bombay entered into an arrangement with Sivaji for the establishment of factories in his territory, and immediately thereafter found themselves faced with a demand from the Mughals for harbour facilities for the Muslim fleet in its operations against the Marathas. Gerald Aungier steered his way through these difficulties with consummate skill, but he soon realised that the Company was in a hopeless position and could only survive if it secured considerable reinforcements at sea and began to pursue a more militant policy. ‘The times now require you,’ he wrote to the Company in 1677, ‘to manage your general commerce with your sword in your hands.’ The directors were not persuaded and forbade the use of force, but a few years later Sir Josia Child, the Governor of the Company for eighteen eventful years from 1681, accepted the logic of facts and recognised the need for a change of policy. The conversion to this view of Sir Josia Child, who was a man of outstanding ability and great independence of thought, is of great interest. He had been primarily responsible for the Company’s submission to the use of Bombay harbour alike by the Muslim fleets and the Maratha frigates, and almost his first act after becoming Governor was to issue a despatch stating that ‘all war is so contrary to our constitution as well as to our interest that we cannot too often inculcate to you our aversion thereunto’. This attitude was understandable and indeed proper in the head of a great commercial organisation, but it was nevertheless based on a misconception. The pacific doctrine laid down at an earlier date by Sir Thomas Roe was appropriate to a time and a place in which there was a strong and stable government; it had no application to the state of anarchy which was developing in large tracts of India as a result of the incipient decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the aggressive Maratha power. In that chaos only the strong could survive; and when the keen intelligence of Sir Josia Child had surveyed the scene a little longer, in 1687 he enunciated the famous principle that the Company must ‘establish such a politic of civil and military power, and create and secure such a large revenue to maintain both . . . as may be the foundation of a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion for all time to come’.

Up to this time the Company had avoided the use of high-sounding titles for their officials in India, but the new approach was symbolised by the appointment of their senior Bombay representative as ‘Captain-General, Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Company’s Force’. The new policy was followed with a zeal beyond what was justified by the strength of the Company. The seizure of Mughal ships and the interference with the Muslim pilgrim traffic stirred up the emperor to an attack on Bombay, which led in 1689 to a humiliating submission on the part of the Company. The licence to trade was, however, renewed, and the only permanent results of this episode were that the Mughals learned to fear the power of the Company to interfere with shipping, while the English on their part were taught a wholesome respect for the Mughal authority.

Meanwhile matters in Bengal had gone from bad to worse. In 1686 the Company, now convinced of the necessity of establishing a great fortified base in Bengal, sent out nine ships and a few hundred soldiers to make war on the Mughal Empire, to blockade the east coast of India and to take possession of Chittagong. Seldom can the sponsors of a naval and military mission have embarked on an undertaking with so little realisation of what it involved. Two ships and three hundred and eight soldiers eventually reached the Hugli River, and were at once required to assist Job Charnock in the defence of the Hugli factory against a besieging army of the Viceroy of Bengal. After a gallant defence, Charnock withdrew, first to the present site of Calcutta, then known as Sutanati, and then to Hijli, lower down the river. For three months the indomitable Job Charnock, with his little band of four hundred men, defended Hijli against twelve thousand men of the Mughal army. Three-quarters of his force had been killed or put out of action, when an English vessel appeared. By an audacious use of trumpets, drums and loud huzzahs, Charnock deceived the enemy into believing that large reinforcements had arrived. In reality the ship only contained seventy soldiers, but the trick succeeded and the Mughal commander sent a flag of truce.

Even then, the obstinacy of the Company and the stupidity of Captain Heath, its emissary, led to an expedition against Chittagong, which inevitably retired after achieving nothing. The general reconciliation of 1690, made after the humiliation of the English in Bombay, was held to include Bengal and the new Viceroy, a man of more peaceable temperament and with a better eye to business than Shaista Khan, encouraged Charnock to return. In August 1690 the English established themselves at Sutanati, which with the adjacent villages of Govindpur and Calcutta was leased to the Company in 1698 at a rent of 1,200 rupees a year. Early in 1693 Job Charnock died, but before his death the Company had once more secured from the emperor exemption from all customs duties in return for an annual payment of 3,000 rupees. Charnock’s only reward was a rebuke from the Company for his failure to send home the normal cargoes while he and his followers were struggling for the right to build in Calcutta.

The policy of the strong right arm had been tried and failed. In spite of the growing anarchy, the Mughal Empire under Aurangzib was still too powerful to be mocked by a handful of adventurers. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when the empire was in the later stages of disintegration, the experiment would be tried again with very different results. The interval, as far as the Company was concerned, was to be occupied mainly with peaceful commercial development.

The growth and the organisation of the Company are not relevant to the purpose of this book and it need only be noted that there were three separate phases of development. From 1600 to 1612 each voyage was an isolated commercial venture, with separately subscribed capital; in the second phase, which lasted until 1661, one ‘Joint Stock’ covered several voyages; while from 1661 onwards the Company operated, as in modern commercial practice, with a permanent capital. It soon came to be regarded as a profitable investment, and within twenty years the value of the shares was practically trebled. While these developments were taking place, the Company was suffering many difficulties in England. In the first place, it was unpopular as a ‘monopoly which drained England of its bullion in order to buy spices, luxuries and toys’ and there was a loud demand for the suppression of the trade; secondly, it suffered many exactions under the early Stuarts; while, thirdly, it had to cope with the interlopers who, in addition to competing illegally for its trade, did positive harm to the Company’s relations with the rulers of India. Cromwell, with his unfailing realism in foreign affairs, gave the Company new life; while Charles II greatly expanded the authority of the Company and gave it the right to issue coinage, to make war or peace, and to exercise jurisdiction over English subjects. Alliance with the Crown, however, was a doubtful blessing in a century which witnessed the Great Rebellion and the Revolution, and on the whole it would be true to say that the Company could never consistently rely on help from home. Its survival, in spite of many injuries done to it in England, was due to the profound faith of the London merchants of the Company in its long-term future and to the dogged courage and determination of sturdy individuals like Ralph Cartwright, Gerald Aungier and Job Charnock.

Chapter V

English and French Rivalry

The stages and methods by which the British Dominion in India was founded have never been widely known in England, but there exists a very general vague belief that the most important step in that process was a bitter and spectacular struggle, extending over many years, between England and France. In reality the most serious rivals of the English were not the French but the Dutch, and the period during which there was a real and continuous struggle between the English and the French in India was limited to about twenty years, and terminated with the end of the Seven Years War.

French development in India may conveniently be divided into three phases, of which the first was the period of peaceful settlement, which ended about 1715 and during which the chief enemies of the French were the Dutch; next came the period of reorganisation and commercial development; and this in turn was followed by the military struggle with the English, which began about 1741 and for all practical purposes ended in 1763. The first phase may be considered to have begun in 1664 with the foundation of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales by the great French minister Colbert. Before that, there had been individual ventures to the East, and indeed a French merchant ship called at Diu on the west coast of India in 1527, some fifty years before the arrival of the first Englishman in that country. The French took little interest in the occasional and isolated ventures of this kind in the sixteenth century, and even the attempts of Henry IV and Richelieu, in the early part of the seventeenth century, to explore the possibilities of Eastern commerce failed to call forth any public enthusiasm. The great cardinal himself, who was perhaps thinking more of colonial than of commercial development, came to the depressing conclusion that ‘the temper of the French being so hasty as to wish the accomplishment of their desires in the moment of their conception, long voyages are not proper for them’. This conclusion may have been unsound, but it was certainly true that in France at that time there was nothing corresponding, even remotely, to the fervent interest of the English seafaring and mercantile classes in Eastern enterprise.

In 1664 a fresh start was made by the French minister Colbert, of whom it has been said that no one before him ‘had so clear an idea of the importance of the navy, commerce, colonies, of sound finance, of the improvement of communications by road, rivers and canals’. He founded simultaneously a West India Company, aimed largely at the conquest and conversion of the heathen, and an East India Company, intended to compete with the Dutch and English companies for the Indian trade. The formation of the ‘Compagnie des Indes Orientales’ was preceded by careful propaganda throughout France, but neither that campaign nor the fact that both Louis XIV and Colbert believed in it sufficiently to invest considerable sums in the new company were sufficient to stimulate public support. The trading community stood aloof from an undertaking which was to be so largely controlled by the Government and the wealthy classes do not seem to have been at all attracted to the idea of eastern venture. Little more than one sixth of the required capital was subscribed by the public, in spite of considerable official pressure, and the company was only launched with the aid of a substantial loan from the Crown.

In the first place, the company was charged with the double task of colonising the island of Madagascar and carrying on trade with India. The colonisation scheme was a failure, and a few years later the company was relieved of this obligation, which had proved a serious drain on its resources. In the meantime, the company’s agents had secured a ‘farman’ or permit from Emperor Aurangzib, authorising them to carry on business in Surat and a similar permit from the King of Golkonda, who at this time was not subordinate to the Mughal emperor, with respect to his dominions. Settlements were soon established at Surat on the west coast and Masulipatam on the east coast, and trade began to flourish under the superintendence of the capable Director-General, Francis Caron. Like many able and forceful men, Caron had an undue belief in the virtue of the strong right arm, and it was largely on his advice that in 1670 a French squadron under de la Haye was sent to Indian waters ‘to show a little sample of his master’s power’. Quite clearly the intention was to convince the local rulers that the French were more to be feared than the Dutch. The plan was thwarted, partly by the dissensions amongst those in authority which continually recurred in the history of the French in India, and partly owing to the unwisdom of Caron, presumably as part of the policy of the strong arm, in encouraging de la Haye to attack St. Thomé. On the other hand Caron would not allow the French squadron to attack the Dutch fleet, and the outside world was given the impression that de la Haye was afraid to fight. In the one case where the two leaders agreed the outcome was still more disastrous, for though de la Haye occupied St. Thomé and with great gallantry and determination held it for two years against the King of Golkonda, the end was inevitable, and in 1674 he capitulated.

The recall of Caron allowed wiser counsels to prevail, and by playing skilfully upon the enmity between the kingdoms of Bijapur and Golkonda, in which latter kingdom St. Thomé was situated, the French secured from the ruler of Bijapur not only the site of Pondicherry, but also assistance in developing it. It was indeed an ideal site, but to the sixty Frenchmen who constituted the first colony there, and who found themselves almost cut off from home and without even dwelling-houses, the prospect must have seemed bleak. Fortunately for the French, their leader, François Martin, was one of the ablest men that France ever sent to India. He rapidly won the confidence of Indians in the locality, he developed a thriving trade in piece goods, and before many years had passed he obtained permission to enlist Indian soldiers. Later he was allowed to fortify the settlement, and, thanks to this great leader, Pondicherry soon became the principal French settlement in India. Caron and Martin had proved that for a people operating far from their own country, without adequate land forces and—more important still—strong naval support, conciliation rather than high-handedness was the path of wisdom.

During the next forty years the French were almost continually at war with the Dutch, either officially in Europe and India, or unofficially in India alone. For a time Pondicherry was in the hands of the Dutch, but the Peace of Ryswick (1697) restored it to the French, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century they had, in addition to Pondicherry, settlements at Masulipatam, Surat, Chandernagore, as well as small factories in various places. During this period there was little direct conflict with the English. The East India Company’s servants were frequently uneasy at this new competition, but the Company did not, in general, aim at a monopoly as against other nations, and except during the short-lived experiment of Sir Josia Child it was interested only in the development and protection of its own trade.

British foreign policy in the eighteenth century involved many changes of front; at one moment England was allied with the Dutch against the French, and at another moment the Dutch were the enemy. In India, although the bias of the East India Company would naturally have been anti-Dutch, European political consideration seldom allowed the development of any corresponding long-term policy, and in the main the English in India were content to allow the French and the Dutch to wear each other out. The Dutch were, in any case, tending to concentrate more on the Far East, and their struggle with the French in India strengthened the position of the East India Company.

In the first two decades of the eighteenth century the power and influence of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales declined, not because of political events in the East, but because of lack of support from home and the hopeless state of the Compagnie’s finances. War with the Dutch had seriously interfered with the carrying trade, and at one stage lack of resources forced the Compagnie to sell its trading rights to a group of merchants from St. Malo for an annual payment. Debts remained unpaid and for a time the Compagnie was almost moribund.

In 1720 the Compagnie was reorganised by that remarkable Scottish controller of French finances, Jean Law, and took on a new lease of life. In this second phase, which was mainly one of peaceful growth, ships again sailed regularly from France to India, trade flourished, dividends were paid and new settlements were established. Nevertheless there were still considerable elements of weakness. Dividends had to be guaranteed, there continued to be a complete lack of public interest, from 1725 to 1765 the shareholders never met, and in fact the Compagnie became a second-rate Department of State. In almost every respect the English Company was in a far stronger position than the French Compagnie on the eve of the War of Austrian Succession. It was financially sounder, had a more extensive trade and organised more numerous and more regular voyages to India. The French Compagnie received grants and subsidies from the Treasury, dealt also in loans and lotteries, and was generally in debt to the French Government. For some years, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was enabled to pay dividends only by borrowing from the Crown. The English Company, on the other hand, was a creditor of the British Government and was indeed at one time in danger of being regarded as a milch cow. The financial weakness of the French Compagnie left the French in a bad position to carry out the aggressive policy inaugurated by Dupleix when he became Director-General in 1741.

Joseph Francis Dupleix was a man of dynamic energy and boundless ambition for his country, who has been described as ‘the most brilliant pro-consul who ever served France in India’. His predecessor, Dumas, had made some successful incursions into Indian political struggles and had lent effective support to the Nawab of the Carnatic against the Marathas. Intervention in such affairs was not, as has been supposed by some modern writers, a new technique introduced by the French. It was, in fact, merely a revival of the policy of the Portuguese two centuries earlier, but the growth of military and naval science and the extreme political instability of eighteenth-century India greatly increased the effect of European intervention. Dupleix, who was by nature what in modern times would be called an imperialist, was abundantly fitted to follow up this policy, and the War of the Austrian Succession gave him an admirable opportunity. Unfortunately for France, the fatal French inability to work in concert played into the hands of the third party. In 1741 Admiral La Bourdonnais, who had been a successful Governor of the Ile de France, made preparations for an attack on the English in the East when the anticipated war broke out, but the delay in the commencement of hostilities—together with the prudent dislike of the French East India Company for his scheme—caused his plans to misfire. In 1745, in his absence, an English fleet appeared off Pondicherry and was only prevented from attacking the settlement by the prohibition of the Nawab of the Carnatic, who was not prepared to have foreigners fighting in his dominions. The English, who were still anxious to retain the goodwill of the local ruler, respected the nawab’s order and withdrew.

A year later the nawab protested similarly against an attack on Madras by the French. They were less conciliatory than the English had been, and the nawab was only pacified by Dupleix’s assurance that the town would be handed over to him after it had been taken. The capture of Madras by La Bourdonnais led to one of the most unseemly of all the quarrels between the French rulers of India. La Bourdonnais undertook to ransom the town to the English for a cash payment, but Dupleix refused to sanction the arrangement and shortly afterwards took possession of Madras. By the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 Madras was given back to the English, much to the disgust of Dupleix, and it might seem that the status quo had been restored. In fact, however, a most significant change had taken place unnoticed.

After the capture of Madras in 1746 the nawab had called on the French to fulfil their promise to make it over to him. On their failure to do so, he sent his son, Maphuz Khan, to attack them. The repulse of this attack was in some ways the turning point in Indian history. The small French garrison of less than five hundred men in Madras was reduced to serious straits for lack of water and it was decided to make a sortie with the aid of two field pieces. Artillery was not new in India, but the remarkable rapidity with which the French discharged their guns took Maphuz Khan’s troops entirely by surprise and they fled in panic. Maphuz Khan rallied his troops and ten thousand of them attacked the force of two hundred and thirty Europeans and seven hundred Indian soldiers. This time the French were not supported by artillery, but the rapidity of their movements led to the complete rout of the nawab’s troops. This action had an electric effect. It made the military reputation of the French in the Carnatic forthwith and inculcated in the minds of Indian commanders a wholesome respect for European arms and discipline.

Equally important was the effect on Dupleix himself. From now onwards he cared little about being a peaceful trader, and began to be increasingly influenced by the vision of a great French military dominion in India. He does not seem to have realised how illusory any such dream must remain as long as the English were predominant at sea. On land the prestige of the English had undoubtedly suffered. Not only had they been unable to defend Madras, but their combined land and sea operations against Pondicherry—whether undertaken with or without the permission of the nawab is not clear—had been unskilfully conducted and had ended in complete failure. At sea, however, since the arrival of a strong naval force under Rear Admiral Boscawen in 1748, there had been no doubt as to English supremacy, and, whatever might be the attitude of the Company towards affairs on land, the English Navy was under no circumstances prepared to acknowledge the right of Indian rulers to protect the French on the Ocean. The first stage of the struggle between the English and the French, ending with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, may on the whole be considered to have left the positions of the two companies fairly even.

The second phase was a seven-year period during which England and France were officially at peace, while the companies took sides in the dynastic struggles of the Carnatic and were, therefore, almost perpetually at war with each other. If Dupleix had wanted a recent precedent for intervention in local disputes, he could have found it in the isolated instance of the English intervention to support a candidate for the throne of Tanjore in return for the promise of a small area of coastal territory. Dupleix, however, was interested not in precedents but in the vast possibilities of empire which had been opened out by the clear demonstration of the superiority of French to Indian armies.

The situation in the Carnatic, which provided Dupleix’s opportunity, was merely one aspect of the disintegration of the Mughal Empire. The invasions of Nadir Shah, the Persian, in 1739, and of Ahmed Shah, the Afghan, a few years later, had shaken the empire to its foundations, while the Marathas from the south-west for a time seemed irresistible. Everywhere strong men were carving out kingdoms for themselves, and chief among them was the famous Nizam-ul-mulk, who had been goaded into rebellion by the stupidity of Aurangzib’s successors and who in 1724 converted the viceroyalty of the south into the hereditary kingdom of Hyderabad.

The death of this wise and firm ruler ushered in a period of anarchy in Southern India. The area known as the Carnatic, comprising the Coromandel coast and its hinterland, had at the beginning of the century been a governorship under the Deccan viceroyalty, but soon after that developed a considerable measure of independence, and could almost be regarded as a principality within the kingdom of Hyderabad. A disputed succession in the Carnatic gave rise to disorder, which was kept within bounds by Nizam-ul-mulk, but his death removed all restraint, and a bitter conflict broke out between the claimants. Two rival candidates also sprang up as successors to the Nizam-ul-mulk, and there were thus simultaneous struggles for the superior throne of Hyderabad and for the subordinate, though semi-independent, rulership of the Carnatic. These two conflicts soon merged into one another, and the history of the Carnatic for the next few years is largely filled with the alliances and counter-alliances, the intrigues and the battles to which these two sets of dynastic struggles gave rise.

This was the kind of situation which Dupleix could not resist. His aim was to make the Carnatic dependent on the French and at the same time to acquire a dominating influence at the court of the Nizam. The French therefore allied themselves with Muzzafar Jang, who as grandson of the Nizam-ul-mulk was a candidate for the Nizamship, and also with Chanda Saheb, a rebel against the reigning Nawab of the Carnatic. The opponents and rivals of the two candidates, backed by the French, appealed to the English for help, and the East India Company rather half-heartedly committed itself to their cause. The two companies were thus at war, while England and France were at peace. It is not necessary for the purpose of this book to go into the rather dreary history of this unofficial war. From 1748 to 1751 the French were generally successful; they installed and maintained their candidates on both the disputed thrones, and, more important still, an able French soldier, generally known as Bussy, established himself at Hyderabad in a kind of double capacity, as representative of the French and counsellor to the Nizam. The English, who were still not entirely convinced of the wisdom of participating in these struggles, at one time withdrew from active support of their candidates, but further consideration suggested that if the French were able to capture and control Trichinopoly, the East India Company would be cut off from the trade of the interior. Trade was still the touchstone by which the East India Company tested every policy, and this new threat to trade at last brought the English wholeheartedly into the war. The relief of Arcot (the capital of the Carnatic), the brilliant achievements of Robert Clive, the relief of Trichinopoly and the final establishment of the English candidate as Nawab of the Carnatic, followed in quick succession and all the organising and political ability of Dupleix availed for little in face of the marked superiority of English generalship.

Peace talks were initiated by Dupleix, but the English, conscious of their new strength, considered his terms unsatisfactory and the war continued. At this stage the directors of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, who had long been dissatisfied not only with Dupleix’s aggressive policy but also with his failure to consult them or even to keep them informed about matters of major importance, sent out Godeheu with power to make peace. The arrival at this time of strong English naval reinforcements strengthened Godeheu’s conviction that the war must be terminated, and in January 1755 a provisional treaty was signed. The Seven Years War broke out before it had been ratified and the only effect of the treaty was to give both sides a breathing space.

Once again there was not much to choose between the position of the English and the French. The English had proved their superior generalship and were strong at sea, but, on the other hand, the French had received from the Nizam the important districts known as the Northern Circars, and Bussy had established a remarkable ascendancy at the court of Hyderabad.

Dupleix was recalled in 1755, and since that date his policy and the repudiation of it by the Compagnie have been the subject of much controversy. Colonel Malleson and other nineteenth-century biographers of Dupleix have taken the line that ‘his work did not endure because it was his misfortune to employ inferior tools’, and that just when success was in sight ‘he was recalled at the instance of the immemorial enemy of France, on the eve, moreover, of a war, which for the seven years that were to follow, was to try the resources against France of that very enemy’. Recent research has established beyond doubt that the English had no hand in the recall of Dupleix, and on the whole the judgment of the Compagnie at the time must be upheld in the light of present knowledge. The task which Dupleix had set himself was beyond the power of the French to perform. Even if they had possessed the naval superiority and the military skill and strength which were required, the Compagnie’s hopeless financial condition, and its complete dependence on the French Government, foredoomed Dupleix to failure. If, like the English East India Company, the Compagnie had been a creditor rather than a debtor of the state, it might have been able for a time to pursue a policy not wholly dependent on the general political position of France. As it was, the Compagnie was merely a department of the state, and when, in addition to being unprofitable, its military failures added to the considerable political troubles of France its aggressive activities were bound to be curtailed. Truculence on the part of overseas chartered companies can be supported by the home government only when it is both successful and lucrative, and perhaps Dupleix’s chief defect was his inability to see the Indian problem against this larger background. Inadequate financial backing, military weakness and naval inferiority were the true reasons for Dupleix’s failure, and the intervention of the Compagnie was not pusillanimous, but plain sense. Only a completely irresponsible statesman would have continued the war with an empty treasury.

However cogent these arguments for peace must have seemed to thoughtful Frenchmen, they were nullified by the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756. Count Lally was sent out from France with instructions to avoid the Dupleix system of alliances, and to aim solely at the destruction of the English. In 1756 the English were fighting for their existence against Siraj-ud-daula in Bengal, and it was fortunate for them that the French forces did not reach Pondicherry until 1758, by which time Clive was sufficiently well established to be able to turn his attention to the south. In spite of the apparent strength of the French position, its two weakest elements did not escape the eye of Clive, who in 1759 wrote thus: ‘I am confident before the end of this year they will be near their last gasp in the Carnatic, unless some very unforeseen event interposed in their favour. The superiority of our squadron and the plenty of money and supplies of all kinds. . . are such advantages as, if properly attended to, cannot fail wholly effecting their ruin in that, as in every other part of India.’

Money was indeed a great trouble with Lally from the start. The Governor of Pondicherry, who controlled the main French Treasury, was unable to finance operations, and the impetuous Lally made a hastily conceived and ill-executed attack on Tanjore to enforce payment of an outstanding debt and furnish them with ready cash. It ended in complete failure and gravely harmed the French reputation.

Lally next proceeded in December 1758 to besiege Madras, but in the meantime the French admiral had twice been worsted by the English fleet, and the appearance of the English ships before Madras compelled Lally to raise the siege. Again the reputation of the French had suffered and the morale of the English was correspondingly raised.

A worse blow was soon to fall on the French. Their forces were at this time divided, between Hyderabad and the Carnatic. This division was a symbol of the serious disagreement between Charles Castelnau de Bussy, who was perhaps the ablest Frenchman then in India, and Lally. De Bussy had for some time been building up a position of great influence at Hyderabad and in his view the retention of a strong French military force there was essential. Lally, on the other hand, declared bluntly that he was only concerned with driving the English out and was not interested in the affairs of rajas and nawabs. In the abstract Lally was perhaps right, and was indeed acting in accordance with the instructions of the Compagnie, but Dupleix had left behind him a legacy of entanglements which could not be simply ignored. In obedience to an order, de Bussy joined Lally in the Carnatic, but a large and important body of French troops was left behind in Hyderabad. The absence of these troops was bitterly felt when, in October 1758, a detachment under Colonel Forde, sent by Clive to create a diversion, wrested the Northern Circars from the French, and six months later captured Masulipatam. A decisive defeat of the French navy off the Coromandel coast in September 1759, and an equally decisive victory by Sir Eyre Coote over Lally at Wandiwash, led to the siege of Pondicherry, which surrendered in January 1761. Chandernagore had been taken by Clive early in the war, and within a few weeks of the fall of Pondicherry the remaining French settlements surrendered.

This was the end not only of the war but of the effective struggle of the French for power in India. Pondicherry was indeed restored to France at the end of the war, but in an unfortified condition and the French military establishment in India was severely limited. Twenty years later, during the War of American Independence, a French fleet made one more appearance off the coasts of India. It was commanded by Suffren, one of the greatest of French admirals, but in the absence of any base for supplies or repairs it achieved nothing substantial and in no way affected the ultimate position in India. After the Peace of Paris in 1763, England was not seriously endangered by the rivalry of other European powers in India either in the political or the commercial spheres.

Of the three main factors which account for the success of the English in the Seven Years War in India, the first and most obvious was the naval inferiority of the French. The second was the superiority of the East India Company’s resources, both in money and in supplies. While Lally was constantly hard put to it to pay and provision his troops, the English had behind them the ‘plenty of money and supplies’ which came from Bengal. The sound financial policy of the East India Company over many years was in strong contrast with the continual indebtedness of the Compagnie des Indes and counted for a great deal in the struggle between the two companies. The third factor—which a study of the campaigns, both during the Seven Years War and during the unofficial war which preceded it, makes abundantly clear—was the marked superiority of English generalship. This factor may be regarded as accidental, and even without it there can be little doubt that the first two factors would have resulted in the ousting of the French from India.

Chapter VI

The Growth of British Power

Although the struggle between the English and the French had taken place mainly in South India, reports and rumours regarding it had alarmed the rulers of Bengal, who saw a serious menace in the new technique of European intervention in the disputes of Indian princes. They feared that a similar situation might arise in Bengal, and the suspicion engendered by this fear, combined with certain reasonable complaints about the trading privileges of the English, led in 1756 to an attack on the Company’s factories in Kasimbazar and Calcutta which stirred the Company to aggressive action and so opened the way for the ultimate establishment of British military supremacy.

The political condition of Bengal at that time was extremely unstable. In the great days of the Mughal Empire provincial governors had been immediately responsible to the court at Delhi, but as the power of the Central Government declined this system of direct control broke down. The empire was divided into viceroyalties or subas, and the three provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa were formed into a suba, though each retained its own governor. The relations of the viceroy or subadar with the empire on the one hand, and with his provincial governors on the other, depended mainly on personal factors, but in the resulting struggles the centrifugal tendency was always strong. In 1739 Alivardi Khan, Governor of Bengal, revolted against the subadar of the three provinces, and with help from Delhi secured the viceroyalty for himself. Bitter fighting was required before he could establish his authority, and even after its successful conclusion the new provincial governors were left with the thought that at some suitable opportunity they might follow his example. Intrigues with the authorities in Delhi were endless, and the resulting weakness was made more serious by the Maratha invasions of Bengal. These were repelled only after prolonged and exhausting fighting, which distracted Alivardi Khan’s attention from other affairs and increased existing instability.

The situation was made worse by the absence of any natural successor to the viceroyalty, and when Siraj-ud-daula, grandnephew of Alivardi Khan, became subadar in 1756, he had at once to deal with rival claimants. Political prejudices have for long obscured the true character of Siraj-ud-daula. To the average English schoolboy, the association of his name with the Black Hole of Calcutta has made him appear a monster of cruelty and depravity. Indian nationalists, on the other hand, have in recent years attempted to minimise his vices and to discover in him virtues which were not apparent to his contemporaries. It is not necessary to regard Siraj-ud-daula as any worse than many of the subordinate princes of the Mughal Empire. It is clear that he was weak, dissolute, and thought ill of by those who knew him, and that he was certainly not the man to deal with the troubles in Bengal.

His circumstances and his nature combined to make him apprehensive, and his suspicion was quickly aroused by the strengthening of the Company’s fortifications in Calcutta. In spite of assurances by the Company that these works were intended for defence against a French attack by sea, the nawab was convinced that they were inspired by hostility to himself. In the light of the evidence there can now be little doubt that the nawab’s suspicions were unfounded. There was in fact a remarkable absence of fortifications on the land side of Calcutta from which any attack by the nawab would come. In any case, the forces then available to the English in Calcutta were so small that it would have been madness on their part to contemplate a fight with the nawab. In point of fact there is no evidence whatsoever in any of the contemporary correspondence to show that they had any such idea. On the other hand, their fears of the French at the beginning of the Seven Years War were well grounded, and they had no reason to expect protection from the nawab against their European enemy. Siraj-ud-daula nevertheless refused to accept their assurances, and within a few weeks of the commencement of his rule seized Kasimbazar and attacked Calcutta. For once the English in India failed to find a leader, and there is little in the story of the defence of Calcutta which is at all creditable. The English leaders fled, the town was taken easily and for the moment the triumph of the nawab seemed complete. It is not necessary to describe in detail the famous incident of the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was the sequel to the nawab’s victory. Modern research has left little doubt that the main outlines of the traditional story are correct although there may have been exaggeration of the numbers involved, and although the nawab himself may have had no personal knowledge of the occurrence. The only relevance of this deplorable occurrence to the purpose of this book is the unfortunate effect which it had on relations between the two races in late years.

It is much to the credit of the Company’s servants in Madras that, in spite of their preoccupation with the French troubles, within three months they despatched Admiral Watson and Robert Clive to Bengal to deal with the situation. On 2nd January 1757 Clive recovered Calcutta, and the nawab was so apprehensive of future possibilities that he made a treaty confirming the English in their former privileges.

From this time onwards Siraj-ud-daula displayed the true weakness of his character and vacillated between friendship with the English and support of the French. He began by seeking the aid of the English against a threatened Afghan invasion, and at the same time gave permission to the Company’s troops to attack Chandernagore. Soon after that he changed his mind, and shortly afterwards he gave protection to the French fugitives. The result of his indecision was that he alienated both of the European powers and led the English on to intrigue against him and plan his downfall. The Company’s servants had come to feel that the position in Bengal was so unstable that a coup d’état was close at hand and that they had better be in on the deal. In the words of the Select Committee which shared with Clive the governance of the Company’s affairs in Bengal: ‘The Nawab is so universally hated by all sorts and degrees of men; the affection of the Army is so much alienated from him by his ill-usage of the officers and a revolution so generally wished for, that it is probable that the step will be attempted (and successfully, too) whether we give our assistance or not.’

Unlike Alivardi Khan, who had wisely built his position on Hindu loyalties, Siraj-ud-daula had dismissed or alienated his principal Hindu advisers, while at the same time he had driven Mir Jafar, the chief Muslim officer of the court, into opposition. A combination of these dissatisfied elements with the English led to the Battle of Plassey in June 1757 and to the complete defeat of Siraj-ud-daula. Technically considered, Plassey was not a great military victory. It was, however, an example of what could be achieved by a handful of English troops led by an audacious commander and making full use of faction and intrigue amongst leading Indians. Mir Jafar was proclaimed subadar in place of Suraj-ud-daula and in legal form the position of the Company was in no way changed as a result of the battle; the Company still continued to trade on the authority of the permits issued by the emperor. In practice, however, Bengal was now ruled by a nawab who depended on the English for protection, and henceforward the Company had the whip hand. There was still no general desire on the part of the Company to acquire territory, and the Battle of Plassey can reasonably be regarded as a measure essential for the safety of the English. Clive’s action was, however, marred by the acceptance of large presents for himself and his companions from his principal fellow conspirators, as well as by his shameful trickery of Omichand, a rich banker who was an important party to the conspiracy.

A main element in Clive’s policy after Plassey was the maintenance in power of the nawab’s Hindu officials, very much against the wishes of the nawab himself. This considerably strengthened the influence of the Company and was justified by the loyalty and ability with which Ram Narayan, the Hindu Deputy Nawab of Bihar, resisted the attacks of the emperor’s eldest son until the English came to the rescue. By this policy—which perhaps provides part of the foundation for the modern Indian political belief that the general policy of the English in India was to divide and rule—Clive succeeded in keeping himself strong and the nawab weak.

After Clive’s departure in 1760, a radical change in policy ensued. Holwell, who acted in Clive’s place for a few months pending the arrival of his permanent successor, Vansittart, disliked and distrusted the nawab and was anxious to depose him on the grounds, firstly, of his intrigue with the Dutch against the English and, secondly, of his nonfulfilment of his treaty obligations. Holwell’s own idea was that the Company itself should become the subadar. This view was not accepted by Holwell’s colleagues, and when Vansittart arrived a new plan to name Mir Kasim as successor to the nawab and to make him deputy-subadar was adopted. Mir Jafar, who was not prepared to accept this proposal, was deposed, and Mir Kasim succeeded him as subadar. Once again the Company’s officials received large presents, but a more important result was the cession of three districts in Bengal to the English.

Vansittart, a master of political ineptitude, next aimed at taking a hand in the fight for power in Delhi and in establishing the emperor’s eldest son on the throne. Fortunately Mir Kasim, who was to have played a principal part in this transaction, backed out, partly on account of his growing fear and suspicion of the English. Vansittart then allowed the Nawab of Bengal to get rid of his Hindu pro-British advisers and soon discovered that the nawab had made his position so strong that he could afford to defy the Company’s wishes. This led to a bitter dispute, in which the nawab had a good deal of justification on his side, with regard to the trade carried on inside the country by the Company’s servants.

It will be remembered that the emperor’s firman had relieved the Company from all customs and dues in return for a fixed annual payment. The servants of the Company had for some time contended that this entitled them to carry on internal trade as private individuals, particularly in salt and tobacco, free of duty. Finding themselves in power, Vansittart and his colleagues decided to enforce this claim. After a bitter wrangle, Mir Kasim cut the ground from under the feet of the English by determining to abolish customs dues on internal trade altogether. The Company at once made war, and a rapid campaign, culminating in the Battle of Buxar in October 1764, resulted in the complete defeat and exile of Mir Kasim.

This campaign differed from the Battle of Plassey in two important respects. In the first place, it was undoubtedly aggressive in its nature, for it arose solely from the determination of the English to enforce their will in a manner affecting the internal sovereignty of the nawab. Secondly, it conclusively demonstrated the military supremacy of the English, whereas at Plassey the Company’s success had been at least partly due to the treachery of Siraj-ud-daula’s supposed allies. From this time it was clear that the Company would be the effective master of Bengal.

Mir Jafar was restored to the viceroyalty, but when he died his son was only allowed to succeed on condition of accepting a deputy-subadar who would exercise all real power and who would be nominated by the English. The nawab in fact ceased to count. Nevertheless the English fondness for due process of law led Clive, who had now returned to India, to obtain from the Mughal emperor what was known as the diwani. Two hundred years earlier the Emperor Akbar had divorced revenue and finance from general administration. The subadar or viceroy was responsible for law and order and connected matters while the diwan was directly responsible to Delhi for realising the revenue and for making available to the subadar the agreed sum for provincial administration. At the beginning of the eighteenth century subadar Murshid Quli Khan had reunited the two functions. In 1765 the emperor once again divided them and appointed the East India Company to be diwan for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The Company was thus henceforward entitled to collect the revenue from Bengal, subject to annual payments of 53 lakhs of rupees to the nawab for the expenses of administration and of 26 lakhs to the emperor.²

The Company did not at this stage exercise the right of collecting the revenue directly, but appointed as deputy-diwan that same person—Muhammad Reza Khan—who had been appointed deputy-subadar by the nawab in accordance with the arrangement made on the accession of Mir Jafar’s son. All the practical powers of government were thus united in the hands of one person who was himself responsible to the Company, while the Company itself had no real responsibility for the good administration of the province.

From the point of view of the people of the province, nothing worse than this dual system could have been devised, and it rapidly resulted in all manner of abuses. Four years later an English resident at Murshidabad was to write that ‘since the accession of the Company to the diwani, the condition of the people in this country has been worse than it was before . . . this fine country which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary Government is verging towards its ruin’. It may reasonably be doubted whether changes in administration do in fact operate as rapidly as this would suggest and there are reasons for regarding this statement as not altogether a balanced view. There can, however, be no doubt that the system was bad and that the few years during which it was administered were not creditable to the English people. It was not brought to an end until 1772, when the Company, under the guidance of Warren Hastings, decided to ‘stand forth as Diwan’; in other words, to accept responsibility for the administration of the country as regards revenue and finance.

In 1765 Vansittart, incensed at treachery on the part of the ruler of Oudh, had started negotiations with a view to returning that province to the emperor. Immediately on his return to India, Clive annulled this decision and returned Oudh to its own ruler, the nawab, but gave Allahabad and an adjacent district to the emperor. In other words, he embarked on a policy of building up Oudh as a buffer state between Bengal and the chaos which existed at that time in Upper India.

The maintenance of the integrity of Oudh long continued to be a cardinal point of British policy in Northern India, and when in 1771 the emperor allowed himself to be either cajoled or bullied into collaboration with the Marathas the Company took back Allahabad and the neighbouring districts and gave them to Oudh.

The next decade was covered by the Governor-Generalship of Warren Hastings. Certain aspects of the many controversies which have gathered round Warren Hastings will be discussed in other sections of this book. For our present purpose the important consideration is that he aimed not at territorial expansion, but at strengthening the roots of the English in Bengal. The famous incidents connected with his treatment of Chait Sindh, Raja of Benares, and of the Begum of Oudh are not relevant to the purpose of this book except as illustrations of the growing power and self-confidence of the English.

Apart from these spectacular happenings, Warren Hastings’ term of office was remarkable for strenuous and partially successful attempts to reform the corrupt English administration and for the establishment of a new and more satisfactory relationship between the East India Company and the British Government. The problem of this relationship was far from easy. A corporation established to carry on trade had suddenly found itself in possession of practical territorial sovereignty based, not on rights delegated to it from the British crown, but on grants from the Mughal emperor. In the judicial sphere the Company was equipped with courts authorised to try offences or disputes arising within its own settlements or affecting its own servants, but now it found itself also responsible for the administration of justice throughout a vast territory with which its own courts had no jurisdiction to deal. In strict legal theory the British Government could have left matters just where they were and the Company could have carried on as the nominal agent of the Delhi authorities. They would clearly have been wrong, not only in view of the importance of India to England, but also in the light of the moral responsibility of England for the people of Bengal, who had in fact been brought under English rule.

Particular attention was drawn to this responsibility by the many and scandalous abuses which grew up in the period when the Company had power without responsibility and which in the time of Warren Hastings aroused the conscience of an important section of English parliamentarians. Less worthy motives, such as the growing jealousy of ‘nabobs’ who returned from India at an early age with fabulous wealth, were also at work. There was also the genuine fear that this newly acquired wealth, which was already being used to buy political influence in England, would rapidly complete the corruption of English public life. For all these reasons Indian affairs occupied a very prominent place in Parliament from 1765, when the Company became the effective master of Bengal, to the end of the century.

Honest Englishmen were puzzled as to how to deal with so novel a problem. One possible solution was for the Crown formally to take over the newly acquired territories. This would have raised many difficult problems. Clearly the Crown could not have accepted a position of subordination to the Mughal emperor, while on the other hand a formal repudiation of his authority might have led to considerable trouble in India and might also have produced international complications. The plan finally adopted was a compromise. It was, in the words of P. E. Roberts, that ‘the state should take the Company into partnership, assuming the position of controlling and predominant partner in all matters relating to the higher branches of Government, but leaving to the Company the monopoly of the trade, the disposal of its valuable patronage under Crown sanction and the details of the administration’.

The first step in this direction consisted merely in demanding from the Company an annual payment. The second step was the Regulating Act of 1773, which left patronage and commerce in the hands of the Company, but gave the Home Government effective power of political superintendence. In the East it established a system under which the Governor-General of Bengal was to be assisted by four councillors, but was to have no right of overriding the views of his colleagues. Thanks partly to the inherent defects of the Act itself, but still more to the personalities concerned, the Act was most unsatisfactory in its operation, and in the early years of his office as Governor-General Hastings was continually frustrated by factious and sometimes malicious opposition.

In the Act of 1784 these defects were remedied. The ultimate authority over the Company was put in the hands of a Board of Control, two members of which were to be Secretaries of State, so that the view of the English Government must prevail. In India the Governor-General was given adequate control over the other presidencies, while by a supplementary Act passed in 1786 he was authorised to override his colleagues in certain circumstances. This Act was, on the whole, satisfactory, but it is unfortunate that the greatest of the Governors-General should have been handicapped for much of his term by having to work under an impossible system. Some aspects of this impracticability will be discussed later, but in the meantime it is necessary to turn attention to Southern India, which was the scene of the next phase in the expansion of British power.

Chapter VII

Developments in Southern India

Although the development of British power in India was a continuous process from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, there were three main phases of expansion. The first phase, which ended in 1765, was characterised by the establishment of British power in Bengal and the maintenance of Oudh as a buffer state. The second great period of expansion is associated with the names of Cornwallis and Wellesley and may be considered as having lasted from 1786 to 1805. The third phase of conscious expansion began about 1838 when Lord Auckland was Governor-General, continued through the Governor-Generalships of Ellenborough and Hardinge and reached its culmination in the time of Dalhousie just before the Indian mutiny.

In the first phase the expansionist urge had been induced by the hostility of the nawab and was of very temporary duration. At its close the Company turned back once more to its policy of ‘trade not conquest’, or ‘dividends above all’. Immediately after the Battle of Buxar in 1764 the temptation to embark upon conquest must nevertheless have been very strong. The Mughal emperor had become the shadow of a great name, the Marathas had not yet recovered from their crushing defeat at Panipat by the Afghans, and there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. The English historian Dow, writing in 1776, said: ‘It is apparent from what has been said that these immense regions might all be reduced by a handful of regular troops. Ten thousand European infantry together with the Seapoys in the Company’s service, are not only sufficient to conquer all India, but with proper policy, to maintain it for ages as an appendage to the British Crown.’ That gallant and successful soldier, Sir Eyre Coote, strongly advocated a British march to Delhi soon after Clive’s return to India in 1765, and would have effected the conquest of all India in the name of the Mughal emperor.

Clive himself gave long and serious consideration to this problem, and in 1765 he wrote: ‘We have at last arrived at that critical period . . . which renders it necessary to determine whether we can or shall take the whole to ourselves . . . it is scarcely hyperbole to say that tomorrow the whole Moghul Empire is in our power. The inhabitants of the country have no attachment to any obligations; their forces are neither disciplined, commanded or paid as ours are. Can it then be doubted that a large army of Europeans would effectually preserve us sovereigns, not only holding in awe the attempts of any country prince, but rendering us so truly formidable that no French, Dutch or other enemy will presume to molest us.’ The adoption of a policy of conquest, however, might well have had the effect of arresting the disintegration of the country and uniting its warring elements against the Company. Clive wisely laid down his view in a Minute shortly before his final departure from India. ‘Our possessions should be bounded by the Provinces . . . we should studiously maintain peace; it is the groundwork of our prosperity. Never consent to act offensively against any Powers expect in defence of our own, the Kings or the Nawab-Wazir’s dominions as stipulated by treaty, and above all things be assured that a march to Delhi would not only be a vain and fruitless project, but attended with destruction for your own army, and perhaps put a period to the very being of the Company in Bengal.’ On the occasion of the restoration of Allahabad to Oudh he declared: ‘My resolution, however, was and my hopes will be to confine our assistance, our conquests and our possessions to Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. To go farther is, in my opinion, a scheme so extravagantly ambitious and absurd that no Governor and Council in their senses can adopt it, unless the whole system of the Company’s interest be first entirely remodelled.’

This view was emphatically confirmed by the Court of Directors on more than one occasion and notably in 1767 when they wrote: ‘The diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the possessions we hold in those Provinces are the utmost limits of our views on that side of India; on the coast the protection of the Carnatic and the possession of the Sircars, free from all engagements to support the Subah of the Deccan, or even with the Sircars, preserving only influence enough over any country power who may hold them, to keep the French from settling in them; and on the Bombay side the dependencies thereon, the possession of Salsette, Bassein and the castle of Surat. Much has been wrote from you and our servants in Bengal on the necessity of checking the Mahrattas, which may in some degree be proper, but it is not for the Company to take the part of umpires of Hindustan . . . we wish to see the present Indian powers remain as a check one upon another without our interfering.’ So firmly was this non-expansionist view held in political circles in London, that when the constitution of the Company and its relations with the Crown were revised in 1784 it was declared that ‘to pursue schemes of conquest and extention of dominion in India are measures repugnant to the wish, the honour, and policy of this nation’. The Act of 1784 itself contained the clause that ‘it shall not be lawful for the Governor-General and Council without the express command of the Court of Directors, or of the Secret Committee . . . to declare war or commence hostilities, or enter into any treaty for making war, against any of the country princes or states in India, or any treaty for guaranteeing the possessions of any country princes or states . . . except where hostilities have actually been commenced, or preparations actually made for the commencement of hostilities against the British nation in India, or against some of the princes or states whose territories the Company shall be engaged by any subsisting treaty to defend or guarantee’.

If conditions in India had remained unchanged from the time of Clive this policy of standing aloof might have been practicable. In the following twenty years, however, the process of disintegration of the Mughal Empire continued, while at the same time the power both of the Marathas and of Haidar Ali of Mysore became formidable. It soon became clear that either the English must fight for the right to fill the void caused by the break up of the Mughal Empire or else they must be prepared to be driven out of India by these two rising powers. This position requires some further consideration.

The most important political event during the century before Plassey was the growth of the power of the Marathas. It is not possible here to recount the history of that brave and hardy people, whose home was in the hills of Western India, and who, though of low-caste origin, had allied themselves with and indeed absorbed a community of Brahman political leaders. In the middle of the seventeenth century they were profoundly affected by the contemporary Hindu revival, and this impulse together with their own fighting qualities and the military genius of the great Shivaji led them from obscurity to the position of the most important military power in India. Shivaji extended his rule over a wide area, much of which his immediate successors were not able to hold, but the desire to regain the whole kingdom of Shivaji, and at the same time to establish the Hindu Empire of India, fed the flame of Maratha ambition when the decline of the Mughal Empire became rapid in the eighteenth century. It led them into temporary alliances with the great Rajput fighting princes and such a powerful combination might well have achieved its aim but for three important factors.

The first of these was the inherent inability of the Marathas to act in combination for any length of time; again and again in their history a dissatisfied Maratha chieftain would wait for some great crisis to make war upon his rivals and to ally himself with what should have been the common enemy. A second factor which would in any case have made their ultimate success doubtful was the extreme instability of their political organisation. They were not interested in the art of administration, and when their strength wrested a province from the Mughal emperor, what they sought was not the right to rule, but merely the authority to collect revenues and other dues from the area which had come under their control. Where possible they obtained a guaranteed annual payment or an assignment on other properties. In areas of direct collection Brahman revenue collectors were appointed, and when local resistance was encountered large-scale raids known as mulkgiri expeditions were organised to collect the arrears. These expeditions in no way differed from raids into enemy territory, and left behind them poverty and desolation. In the words of Grant Duff, the great historian of the Marathas: ‘When the Marathas proceeded beyond their boundary, to collect revenue and make war were synonymous. Whenever a village resisted, officers were seized, compelled by threats and sometimes by torture, more or less severe, to come to a settlement; money was seldom obtainable, but securities from bankers, with whom all the villages had dealing, were preferable as they were exchanged for bills payable in any part of India.’ Even if their military success had been unchecked, it is very doubtful if a people whose notions of administration were so elementary could have achieved or maintained a wide empire.

As it happens, however, there was also a third external factor at work. Throughout history any weakness in the power ruling at Delhi had invariably been the signal for a fresh descent of raiders from the north-west. The decadence of the Mughal Empire opened the way for a disastrous invasion by Nadir Shah, the Persian, in 1739; and when a few years later Ahmad-Shah-Abdali succeeded to the position of Nadir Shah, he, too, cast envious eyes on the riches of Upper India. His first attempts were unsuccessful, but they were soon followed up by expeditions on a greater scale, and in 1751 the Marathas formed an alliance with the Mughal emperor against the Afghan invaders. The Marathas were the spearhead of the defence, and when the Afghans were driven back to their own country were rewarded with territory in Upper India. Their triumph, however, was short-lived, for further invasions and the capture of Delhi by Ahmad Shah in 1756 were but the prelude to a far greater struggle which ended at the Battle of Panipat in 1761 with the complete defeat of the Marathas forces by Ahmad Shah. The Marathas had risen to power by reason of their mobility and their skill in guerilla tactics; of late, however, they had copied from European armies the more rigid methods of mass attack and defence. In these tactics they were no match for the Afghans. At one stage, their Rajput allies, as well as one or two of the ablest of their own chieftains, strongly urged the Maratha generals to return to their traditional tactics. The commander-in-chief, however, was obstinate, and at Panipat the Maratha army, greatly encumbered with equipage, with camp followers and with women and children, had no chance against the warriors from the north-west. They had, moreover, made their position weaker by alienating their Rajput allies. They went bravely to their doom, and the Moslem chronicler records that after their defeat ‘the field of battle looked like a tract sown with tulips and as far as the sight could extend nothing could be discovered but bodies stretched at the foot of bodies as if they had been asleep or marshalled by art’.

The vitality and resilience of the Marathas enabled them to recover in due course from this blow, but they never again fought with the same united front. When the English had to deal with them, they were not so much a nation in arms as three or four fighting forces, each under the command of a different chieftain, sometimes in alliance and sometimes at war with each other.

It would have been in keeping with the general pattern of Indian history if, after the Battle of Panipat, Ahmad Shah had founded a new dynasty at Delhi. He made no attempt to do this, but, for reasons which need not be discussed here, withdrew to the north, leaving the Punjab and Upper India in hopeless disorder. Once again India was rapidly becoming fragmented. In the north the English had conquered Bengal, and Oudh had for all practical purposes detached itself from the Mughal Empire to become dependent on the pleasure of the East India Company. The rising power of the Sikhs added yet a fresh element of strife to the Punjab; while further west the Rajputs, who had been permanently estranged by Aurangzib’s treatment of them, ruled their own states in sulky isolation. In the south and centre of India the Marathas had acquired vast power at the expense of the emperor; the Nizam of Hyderabad—formerly a viceroy of the Mughal court—had become independent; while still further south Mysore was now a military state of great importance.

In earlier times the Hindu kingdom of Mysore, smaller in extent than the state which bears that name today, owed allegiance to the great empire of Vijayanagar. That empire had never recovered from its defeat in 1564 by the Muslim kingdom of the Deccan, and Mysore was soon able to throw off its allegiance and expand at the expense of Vijayanagar. By the beginning of the eighteenth century Mysore had attained about one half of its present area. A period of much more rapid growth lay ahead.

Haidar Ali, the son of a Muslim officer of the Mysore court, distinguished himself early in life by his soldierly qualities and was given an important military command. He soon seized power, and although for some years he maintained the nominal authority of the Raja, in reality, from 1763 onward, Haidar Ali was the ruler of Mysore. He was a man of outstanding military ability and inexhaustible energy as well as of great endurance and personal courage. Soon after his assumption of power it became apparent that Mysore would make a bold bid for the supremacy of the south, and indeed much of the history of Southern India from the time of Panipat to the beginning of the nineteenth century is taken up with a never-ending triangular struggle between the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and Mysore.

For the next twenty years the official attitude of the Company towards this triangular contest was one of neutrality. In practice, however, it was impossible to avoid becoming entangled in the complicated struggles taking place at that time, and the only effect of the Company’s policy was to make the situation worse. Had the Company been prepared to ally itself with whichever of the three military powers seemed at any particular time the least aggressive, a measure of peace might have been restored. As it was, the knowledge that the Company would not take a definite line merely encouraged all three of the rival powers to believe that it would remain permanently neutral and allow them to pursue their schemes unimpeded. The result was that for twenty years the English in India were involved in almost continual wars of a most unfruitful kind. Their handling of political affairs during this time was in many respects unskilful, and the position was made worse by the fact that during the first half of Warren Hastings’ term of office the Governments of Madras and Bombay were in a position to act independently. From the English point of view the only satisfactory result of twenty years of ever-shifting alliances and pointless fighting was the emergence of the Company as the strongest military power in India. It is not necessary to follow in detail the somewhat dreary history of the twenty years after the departure of Clive. It will suffice to draw attention to one or two of the highlights of the struggle with the Marathas and with Haidar Ali.

The commencement of the British entanglements with the Marathas provides an excellent example of the unwisdom of divided control. The English Government in Bombay had long been anxious to obtain possession of Bassein and the Island of Salsette. Without any reference to the Governor-General they intervened in a struggle for power amongst the Marathas and undertook to support the famous Raghanath Rao, better known to Indian historians as Dada Sahib, in the hope of securing these territories. Warren Hastings strongly disapproved of these proceedings, but felt that, since military action had been initiated, the Bombay Government must be supported. His Council disagreed with him, and the result was a treaty signed at Purandhar in March 1776, by which the Company were to retain Salsette in return for abandoning their ally, Raghanath Rao. This treaty was at once repudiated by the Court of Directors, and Warren Hastings seized the opportunity of returning to the support of Raghanath Rao. Hastings was perhaps wrong in this decision, but the position was made far worse by the incompetent handling of the resulting campaign by the Bombay Government. British prestige was fortunately restored by the brilliant campaign of Goddard against the Marathas, culminating in the capture of Bassein, and by the success of a comparatively junior British officer, Captain Popham, in capturing Gwalior.

Hastings then skilfully played upon the dissensions amongst the Marathas. In 1782 he concluded the Treaty of Salbai which left the Company in possession of Salsette and secured peace between the English and the Marathas for twenty years. It is not unfair to say that Hastings, by his determination and sagacity, had managed to undo the harm which resulted from the ineptitude of the Bombay Government.

While these transactions with the Marathas were taking place, the Company was getting into ever deeper waters in Madras. The position there was inherently unsatisfactory, for the Company exercised all power in practice, though the nawab remained the legal sovereign and exercised a seriously corrupting influence by borrowing on a large scale from all the Company’s principal servants. As was to be expected, this universal corruption made any kind of clear-cut policy impossible, and the Company allowed itself to be dragged into many unnecessary and unprofitable military proceedings. Typical of these proceedings was the wholly unjustified deposition of the Raja of Tanjore by the Madras Government, and the subsequent order of the Court of Directors to reinstate him.

Far more important was the fact that the Madras Government alienated the Nizam of Hyderabad with regard to one of the districts known as the Northern Sircars, which lay along the coast of Bengal between Orissa and Madras. By the treaty of 1766 the Company held these districts on payment of tribute to the Nizam, but it was agreed that one of them—known as Guntur—should not pass to the possession of the Company until the death of the Nizam’s brother, who held it for life. Ten years later the Madras Government negotiated directly with him and obtained possession of the district without reference to the Nizam. In this and many other ways the Company unnecessarily antagonised the Nizam, and by endless vacillations and inconsistencies succeeded in 1780 in aligning against itself the combined forces of Mysore, the Nizam and the Marathas.

Haidar Ali’s forces were the spearhead of the attack, and in July 1780 he burst down upon the Carnatic with a fury which gave rise to one of the most vivid of all Burke’s purple passages. ‘There ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, of which no tongue can adequately tell. . . . A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, fleeing from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others without regard to sex, age, to the respect of rank or sacredness of function—fathers torn from children, husbands from wives—enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land.’ Like so many of Burke’s declamations, this passage contained a large element of exaggeration, but the attack was indeed formidable and savage.

Warren Hastings acted with his usual energy, superseded the Government of Madras as far as military activities were concerned, and sent his finest soldier, Sir Eyre Coote, to retrieve the situation. Coote defeated Haidar Ali at Porto Novo in July 1781, but this success was soon off-set by the appearance in Indian waters of a French fleet under one of the greatest French admirals, Suffren. The whole position of the Company in India was in great jeopardy. Had Suffren, with forces considerably superior to the English Navy in those waters, been able to hold effective command of the sea, English power would have been brought to a rapid end in Southern India. The dogged resistance of the English seamen gave the Company’s land forces a breathing space, and an unusually vigorous and successful intervention organised by the Bombay Government resulted in the capture of Mangalore. This compelled Tipu Sultan, who had now succeeded his father, Haidar Ali, to withdraw a large proportion of his troops from the main theatre of war in the Carnatic. The balance between the forces of the English and those of Haidar Ali was now more even, and when the Peace of Versailles in 1783 withdrew the French from the contest, the scales seemed to be tilted in favour of the English. Tipu Sultan’s own resources were partially exhausted and he was glad to make the Treaty of Mangalore, which provided for a restoration of the status quo, but which left neither side satisfied, and led inevitably to the third Mysore War six years later.

Chapter VIII

Expansion — The Second Phase

Although it was apparent to the English authorities in India that the policy of neutrality was unworkable, the Court of Directors and the Home Government had not yet accepted this view. A declaration of a non-expansionist policy was made in 1784, and in 1786 Cornwallis was sent out to India as Governor-General with express instructions to avoid war.

These instructions had little relation to reality in the circumstances of the fight for power which was then taking place throughout India. That struggle has been seen by some historians as a conflict between Hindus and Muslims, but this seems to be a serious over-simplification. It is true that the three Muslim powers remaining in India at the time of Cornwallis—Oudh, Hyderabad and Mysore—were all seriously threatened by the growing power of the Marathas. It is equally true that the Rajputs were not in alliance with the Marathas; that the army of each of the contestants was recruited from Hindus and Muslims alike, and that the territorial divisions of the country did not correspond, even approximately, to the differences of religion. At times and in the particular areas the struggle took on a religious aspect, and more often religious feelings were used by cunning rulers to inflame martial ardour. In reality the process was nothing more than a scramble for power in which the principal parties were Mysore, Hyderabad and the four great Maratha houses, with the Sikhs in the background preparing to take part effectively at a later date. For nearly two hundred years the Mughal Empire had provided a focal point to which all political powers in India could be related. That empire had crumbled, and unless the chaos of the eighteenth century was to continue permanently a fresh centre of political power had to be found. That centre might have been provided by the Marathas or by Mysore, but in either case the English would have been driven from the country. Since the Company was not prepared to suffer expulsion, neither Cornwallis’ instructions nor his own inclination could prevent England from being drawn into a long series of wars.

Shortly before the arrival of Cornwallis in India, Tipu Sultan had planned first to crush the Nizam and the Marathas and then to deal with the English, and for this purpose made overtures to the French. In accordance with the policy of neutrality, in 1785 the Governor-General had refused to assist the Marathas against Tipu, and in the next year Cornwallis followed the same policy of non-intervention and failed to give the Nizam adequate backing against his dreaded Maratha enemies. This pacific policy gave Tipu an exaggerated sense of his own power and security, and in fact led him on to further plans for aggression. The results might have been extremely serious, but fortunately Tipu took the initiative and forced Cornwallis into action by attacking Travancore, the integrity of which state the English had guaranteed. This led to war, and after a somewhat hazardous campaign, in which Cornwallis was greatly hampered by the longstanding inefficiency of the Madras Government, Tipu was ultimately besieged in Seringapatam and forced in 1792 to sign a treaty by which he gave up a considerable portion of his territory. The spoils were shared between the Nizam, the Marathas and the English. One of the most important results of this episode was to strengthen the alliance between the Nizam and the Company. Tipu, however, was in no sense crushed, and turned his attention to the north-west, where he sought to encourage the Afghans under Shah Zaman to march to Delhi. From this project they were only deterred by troubles of their own.

The policy of non-intervention also encouraged the aggressive intentions of Mahadaji Sindhia, the greatest of the Maratha chieftains and a man of boundless ambition, who but for his sudden death in 1794 would have spared no effort to drive out the English. The Cornwallis policy, for which indeed it is not fair to blame the Governor-General alone, could not have been continued much longer, and it is ironical that a pacific and non-interventionist approach should have led to the annexation of a considerable portion of Tipu’s territory and should indeed have been the starting point of the second great phase of British expansion in India.

A more pleasing aspect of Cornwallis’ work was the reform of administration. Warren Hastings had made strenuous efforts to bring about such a reform, but had been hampered by a hostile council and by the weakness of his own constitutional position. Cornwallis had a sound backing from home and was master in his own house in India. He was thus able to complete the purification of the Civil Service, to effect many salutary reforms, and to enact one measure of more doubtful wisdom—the Permanent Settlement of Bengal.

After his retirement in 1793, the interest shifts once again to external affairs. His successor, Shore, allowed the Marathas to defeat Hyderabad, and left the Nizam with no choice but to strengthen the French element in his forces. Lord Wellesley, who became Governor-General in 1798, may in a sense be regarded as the first true British imperialist in India. His own authoritarian temperament predisposed him to appreciate the game of power politics then being played in India, and within a few months of his arrival he made clear his intention to curb the power of Mysore. By convincing the Nizam that the English meant business, he secured the removal of the French troops from Hyderabad and their replacement by a force commanded by British officers. He then formed an alliance with the Nizam and the Peshwa against Mysore; he demanded that Tipu Sultan should discontinue his flirtation with the French—with whom the English were now again at war—and, on Tipu’s failure to comply, made war against him. Tipu was defeated and killed, and in 1799 the old Hindu kings of Mysore were restored to the throne of a much truncated state, the residue being divided between the English and the Marathas. By Tipu’s defeat, Wellesley secured ‘an uninterrupted tract of territory from the coast of Coromandel to that of Malabar, together with the entire sea coast of the kingdom of Mysore’. Tipu had many great qualities but lacked his father’s judgment. His final defeat was due largely to his failure to understand the relative power of the English and French in India, or the significance to him of the English command of the seas.

A new imperious note now appeared in the official statements and correspondence of the Governor-General. Writing of the war with Mysore, he said: ‘Happily as I estimate the immediate and direct advantage of revenue and of commercial and military resources, I consider the recent settlement of Mysore to be equally important to your interests, in its tendency to increase your political consideration amongst the native powers together with your means of maintaining internal tranquility and order among your subjects and dependents and of defending your possessions against any enemy, whether Asiatic or European.’ A little later, writing of his system with regard to the states, he made it clear that his aim was ‘to deprive them of the means of prosecuting any measure or of forming any confederacy hazardous to the security of the British Empire and to enable us to preserve the tranquility of India by exercising a general control over the restless spirit of ambition and violence which is characteristic of every Asiatic Government’. Henceforth Britain was launched on the flood tide of imperialism in India.

The Carnatic next claimed Wellesley’s attention. As we have seen, affairs in that territory had long been in a very unsatisfactory condition. The Company had no responsibility for the administration of the Carnatic, but its presence and military power bolstered up the authority of the nawab and prevented the operation of those processes of revolution or war which normally destroy corrupt and oppressive administrations. Under the protecting shield of the English, the administration of the nawab had gone from bad to worse, but for a time the noninterventionist policy of the authorities in London prevented any action to reform affairs in the Carnatic. In 1794 Sir John Shore went so far as to say: ‘That the territories of the Nawab of Arcot may be mismanaged in the most ruinous manner I doubt not; that the Governor should be anxious to correct those evils which from personal observation may be more impressive, I can readily admit; but the existing treaties propose limits even to mismanagement, and let it be as great as is asserted, which I do not deny, these people are not to be dragooned into concessions.’

Although Wellesley took a very different view, even he might have found it difficult to act but for the folly of the nawab in carrying on intrigues with Tipu Sultan against the British. Wellesley was not the man to lose this opportunity, and on the death of the reigning nawab, shortly after the discovery of the intrigue, a treaty was concluded with his successor in 1801 by which the government of the Carnatic was transferred to the Company, while the nawab and his heirs were to receive one-fifth of the next revenues of the Company. A similar process had been applied to Tanjore in 1799.

Nowhere were the evils of a system under which an incompetent or oppressive prince was maintained on his throne by the power of the British more evident than in Oudh. Even the liberal Cornwallis had described the nawab as extorting every rupee he could from his ministers, who in their part were solely concerned with cheating and plundering the people of the country. The continued existence of Oudh as an independent buffer state had relieved the Company from dangers and anxieties, but it had buttressed an administration so bad in every respect that its continuance involved poverty and misery for the inhabitants of Oudh. Not least amongst the evils which affected that unhappy people were the rapacious and unscrupulous English adventurers who infested the province.

By the last decade of the eighteenth century it had become apparent that a state in which disorder was rife could not even provide an effective barrier against an enemy from the north-west. Special point was given to this realisation by the growing menace of the Afghans under Zaman Shah. After somewhat protracted negotiations, in which Wellesley was frankly high-handed, the Nawab-Wazir was compelled to cede to the English his north-western provinces. The revenue from them was to be regarded as payment for troops which the Company proposed to station on the borders of Oudh. Apart from providing a valuable accession of revenue, this arrangement enabled the Company to undertake the direct defence of Oudh on the north-west and brought them into immediate contact with the Marathas.

Shortly before this the Nizam of Hyderabad had voluntarily ceded certain districts to the Company as payment for the forces which it was proposed to maintain for his protection, and Wellesley’s famous system of subsidiary alliances was now in full swing. The development of that system has been shrewdly analysed by Sir Alfred Lyall in four stages. In the first stage the Company lent troops to assist a native prince; in the second stage the Company’s troops undertook a campaign assisted by the forces of a local ruler. This turned out to be an unsatisfactory arrangement, as the troops of the Indian prince could seldom be trusted, and in the third stage, therefore, they were replaced by troops recruited and trained by the Company, the cost being met by the prince concerned. Irregularities in payment by the princes led to the fourth stage in which specific districts were assigned to the Company to pay for the cost of the troops. From the point of view of the English the arrangement was excellent, for it not only provided the Company with a large body of troops at no cost to themselves, but it effectively reduced the capacity of the Indian princes to oppose the Company. Its effect on the country, however, was in some respects bad. The system demoralised many of the rulers and left them free to govern as badly or as oppressively as they liked. On the other hand, by preventing the subsequent growth of powerful modern armies in the separate states it paved the way for the unification of India at a much later date.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century British forces were maintained in Mysore, Hyderabad and Oudh, and either in this way or by direct rule Britain controlled large areas of India. In central India, the Marathas still lay outside our political system, while further north the Sikhs were building up their power in the Punjab, and the Afghans still ruled in the north-west. Wellesley then set to work systematically to draw the Maratha power under English protection. The relations between the different Maratha rulers at this time were complicated and unstable. The Raja of Satara, who held titular sovereignty over the entire Maratha confederacy, had long since ceased to exercise practical control, and all real power had passed into the hands of the Peshwa and his Brahman colleagues in Poona. Of late, however, the confederacy had grown ever looser, and the four great Maratha rulers—Sindhia of Gwalior, Holkar of Indor, the Gaekwar of Baroda and the Bhonsle Rajas of Nagpur—each ruled a vast tract of country in practical independence of the Peshwa.

Mahadaji Sindhia had vastly increased the power of Gwalior. Delhi and the surrounding country was under his control, and the Mughal emperor, whom he held captive, and whom he had blinded, had no choice but to register with due formality Mahadaji’s decrees. So great, however, was the sanctity attaching to the emperor’s name that the powerful Mahadaji thought it worth while to have himself appointed Deputy Vice-Regent of the empire, the Peshwa himself being the Vice-Regent. Mahadaji died shortly after this, but he had built up the Sindhia state as the most powerful single element in the Maratha confederacy.

Enmity between the houses of Sindhia and Holkar was of long standing, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century it combined with a bitter personal quarrel between Holkar and the Peshwa Bajirao to produce a great military struggle in which Sindhia and the Peshwa were defeated, and the Peshwa fled abjectly to the British for protection. The price of protection was the Treaty of Bassein, which brought the Peshwa within the system of subsidiary treaties, and in effect placed his foreign relations under British control. Sindhia and the Bhonsle Raja of Nagpur refused to recognise the Peshwa’s right to conclude such a treaty, combined forces and marched threateningly on Hyderabad. Holkar for the time being held aloof, while the Gaekwar of Baroda was already in alliance with the English. The brilliant campaigns of Arthur Wellesley in the Deccan and General Lake in the north, resulting in the victories of Assaye and Argaon, broke the power of Sindhia and compelled him to enter into the system of subsidiary alliances.

Holkar remained outside the system, but in 1804 his attacks on Jaipur, which was under British protection, led to war between him and the Company. The campaign was inconclusive, but the net result of all these Maratha wars was to establish the supremacy of the English. The power of the Marathas might have been finally broken at this stage, but Wellesley’s imperialism had been too full-blooded for the Court of Directors and indeed for the Home Government. He was withdrawn, a somewhat unsatisfactory peace was made with the Marathas, and the earlier policy of pacification was resumed. Before his departure Wellesley had wrested Delhi and Agra and the adjacent territories from the Marathas and had also secured the important and fertile territory of Cuttack which now linked the Company’s territories in Bengal to Madras. More important still, he had placed the person, family and nominal authority of His Majesty Shah Alam (the Mughal emperor) under the protection of the British Government. In other words, he had made the emperor into a pensioner of the English, and had finally abandoned any pretence of deriving authority from him. In the short space of seven years Wellesley had entirely reshaped British policy and had founded the British Empire in India.

Once again the authorities in London misconceived the Indian situation, and once again the liberal and high-minded Cornwallis was sent as Governor-General to implement an unworkable policy. The affairs of the English Government in India had still not been separated wholly from those of a great trading corporation, and the Directors of the East India Company naturally took a poor view of a policy which had almost put an end to their export trade, which involved an annual expenditure considerably in excess of income, and which, in the words of Cornwallis, ‘yielded little other profit except brilliant gazettes’. Cornwallis himself did not long survive his appointment, but he lived long enough to set in motion the policy of resiling from imperial responsibilities wherever possible and declining to make further commitments. Gwalior and other territories were restored to Sindhia, who was also released from the proposed subsidiary alliance; and if Cornwallis’ original intention had been carried out even Delhi would have been surrendered to Sindhia. The Company shamefully abandoned its Rajput allies, and allowed Jaipur and other Rajput states which had stood faithfully by them to be overrun by the Marathas.

Fortunately Cornwallis’ acting successor, Sir George Barlow, though in most respects faithfully carrying out the pacification policy, resisted pressure from London to abandon the subsidiary treaties with the Nizam and the Peshwa. The net result of all these transactions was that the Company washed its hands of Central India as far as possible. Although the commercial motives which led the East India Company to draw back from its newly acquired responsibilities are comprehensible, it is not so easy to understand why the Home Government supported a policy which could bring neither prosperity to the Company nor peace to India. The English had advanced so far along the road to Empire in India as to make it impossible for any Indian ruler to become the focal point of an Indian political system. If Britain had persisted in the policy of non-intervention, the result would have been not only long-continued chaos but a permanent fragmentation of India.

The Rajputs pressed this point of view emphatically on the British Government, and, according to Sir Charles Metcalfe, British Resident in Rajputana, they said that ‘some power in India had always existed to which peaceable States submitted and in return had its protection against the invasions of upstart chiefs and the armies of lawless banditti; the British Government now occupied the place of that protecting power and was the natural guardian of weak states which were continually exposed to the causes and oppressions of robbers and plunderers, owing to the refusal of the British Government to protect them’.

Bands of robbers were, indeed, one of the gravest scourges of central India at that time. Chief amongst them were those known as Pindaris, who seem to have consisted of men and women of all creeds and classes, who roamed continually about the country in large bodies, looting and committing all manner of atrocities. Their strength had received great accessions as a result of the disbandment of the armies of the native states, and they enjoyed a good deal of support from the Marathas, whose hereditary habits were indeed not far different from their own. The new policy of non-intervention inaugurated by the Company meant that the English must stand by and do nothing to stop the spread of anarchy. So completely indeed had law and order broken down that it was possible for a Pathan chieftain, Amir Khan by name, to roam about Rajputana with thirty thousand horsemen, in nominal alliance with Holkar, plundering on a vast scale.

In 1816 a section of the Pindaris made the mistake of perpetrating an atrocious raid on the Northern Sircars, which had long been in possession of the British. In 1817 the Governor-General, Lord Hastings, was convinced that an attitude of detachment was no longer possible, and even the Home Government recognised that the time for action had come. A widely extended campaign for the suppression of the Pindaris was undertaken, during which the Marathas did everything possible to hamper operations, and at length, when the English were particularly preoccupied with the Pindaris, the Peshwa embarked on war against the British, and Holkar and the Maratha ruler of Nagpur followed his example. A short sharp campaign resulted in the complete defeat of the Marathas, the Peshwa was deposed, the Maratha ruling houses of Sindhia, Holkar and Bhonsle were brought into the orbit of the British political system, and considerable areas of territory were ceded to the Company. Once again the policy of neutrality and nonintervention had failed and the chaos which it had encouraged had compelled the acceptance of greater responsibility for the tranquillity of India.

During this period the Company was involved in two other wars, neither of which can be attributed to mistakes of policy or to aggressiveness, but both of which led to accessions of territory.

The first of these was the Nepal War (1814–16), of which it need only be said that long-continuing encroachment by the Gurkhas on the northern frontier of British India led first to war and then to the cession to Britain of an important strip of territory along the Himalayan foothills. The next war was that against the Burmese (1824–26), which is outside the scope of this book.

Chapter IX

Expansion — The Last Phase

Lord William Bentinck, who assumed office in 1828, was fortunate enough to be one of the few Governors-General whose term of office was wholly peaceful, and few men could have been more suited by temperament and abilities to utilise a time of peace in bringing about social and administrative reform. He placed the judicial system on a sounder footing, he effected substantial retrenchment in the expenditure of the Government, and, more important still, in the words of Macaulay, ‘he never forgot that the end of government is the welfare of the governed’. In the field of social reform he took the historic decision that education should be based on English and not on oriental foundations; he set up a great department under Colonel Sleeman for the purpose of breaking up those gangs of thugs or hereditary assassins which, operating under the sanction of a superstition regarding the Goddess Kali, had long been the terror of the countryside; and he took the responsibility, against the advice of many of those on whose support he principally relied, of prohibiting the immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Some of his actions will require consideration in other sections of this book, but in this section dealing with the historical background it is important to record the great humanitarian use which was made of a few years of peace.

His power to effect reforms was seriously limited by his loyalty to the doctrine of non-intervention in the affairs of Indian states which was laid down from home and which his own temperament predisposed him to accept. This meant in effect that a further period of grace was given to maladministration and oppression in some of the states, though in the case of Mysore misgovernment became so serious that the Raja was removed from effective control of his state, and a British administration, which lasted for fifty years, was established. By this time there had been a general recognition of the paramountcy of British power throughout India, except in the north-west, where the Amirs of Sind, the Sikhs and the Afghans still ruled independently. Towards the end of his tenure of office Wellesley had stated: ‘A general bond of connection is now established between the British Government and the principal States of India, on principles which render it the interest of every state to maintain its alliance with the British Government, which preclude the inordinate aggrandisement of any one of those States by an usurpation of the rights or possessions of others, and which secure to every State the unmolested exercise of its separate authority within the limits of its established dominion under the general protection of the British power.’ By the time of Lord William Bentinck this general principle of paramountcy was almost universally accepted, except in the north-west.

The other event of importance in the history of the Company in this period between the second and third phase of expansion was the change in its commercial character. In 1813 it lost the monopoly of the Indian trade, though retaining that of the trade in China. In 1833, although the charter was renewed for twenty years, the China monopoly was abrogated, and arrangements were made for the ultimate liquidation of the Company’s commercial assets and for the fixation of dividends at ten and a half per cent in the meantime. The Company now became, according to Lord Ellenborough, ‘mortgagee in possession’.

Lord Auckland, who became Governor-General in 1836, ushered in a new policy of expansion, which during his tenure of office could perhaps more accurately be described as unwise aggression. The first result of this new policy was the disastrous intervention in the affairs of Afghanistan, the blame for which must be shared between Lord Auckland and the Whig Government at home.

During the first three decades of the nineteenth century a great Sikh warrior, Ranjit Singh, had established a powerful kingdom in the Punjab, but had been wise enough to recognise the superior power of the English and to avoid measuring his strength against them. An undertaking on the part of the Sikhs, given in 1809, not to maintain military forces east of the River Sutlej, had been scrupulously observed, but the natural result of this restraint was that the war-like and self-confident Sikhs turned their attention to the north and north-west. Within two years of his treaty with the English, Ranjit Singh seized the Kangra District from the Gurkhas; a few years later he occupied Multan; in 1819 he overran Kashmir; and in 1823–4 he took Peshawar. His ambition was boundless and brought him into direct and repeated conflict with the Afghans.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century fear of Russian expansion towards India had been an important factor in British foreign policy, and in 1809 and 1814 led Britain to undertake to help Persia with military support against any European invader. When asked to implement this undertaking in 1826 Britain promptly resiled. The result was to throw Persia into the arms of Russia, and in 1837 a Persian attack on Afghanistan received Russian backing. Afghanistan found herself between two fires of Persia on the west and the Sikhs on the east. Dost Muhammad, the ruler of Afghanistan, appealed to Britain for help, and clearly the wise policy would have been to attempt to reconcile the Sikhs and the Afghans and combine with them against Persia. Lord Auckland, however, who suffered from an unreasoning prejudice against Dost Muhammad, demanded that he should declare his hostility to Russia, but could promise him no support thereafter. Dost Muhammad despaired of help from Britain and most unwillingly turned to Russia. Lord Auckland, against the advice of all his principal officials, thereupon combined with Ranjit Singh to make war upon Dost Muhammad, with the object of reinstating upon the throne of Afghanistan Shah Shuja whom Dost Muhammad had driven from Afghanistan some years earlier.

It is impossible to find any moral justification for Lord Auckland’s action. As regards its expediency it need only be said that it committed us to an indefinite liability, which we could not hope to discharge, on behalf of Shah Shuja, who was generally detested in Afghanistan. In spite of the successes of the initial stages of the war, disaster soon followed. The death of Ranjit Singh led to chaos in the Punjab and deprived the English of their principal support; British military affairs in Afghanistan itself were handled remarkably badly; and the upshot of the matter was a disastrous retreat in which nearly sixteen thousand British soldiers lost their lives. The first Afghan War is recognised by modern historians as one of the most foolish and discreditable episodes of British history in India.

Like most wrong actions, it bred further evil. Ranjit Singh, though glad enough to accept our alliance against the Afghans, was not prepared to allow a British army to march through the Punjab, and the British forces were therefore compelled to attack through Sindh. That country was entirely independent of British power, but a treaty made in 1832 and renewed in 1834 provided that the rivers and roads of Sindh should be open to the merchants and traders of Hindustan. It specifically forbade the passage of armed vessels or military stores through the country. When the Afghan War broke out Lord Auckland calmly informed the amirs of Sindh that this treaty restriction would be ignored. He then forced them to pay for the maintenance of a British subsidiary force in Sindh, and told them quite frankly that if they demurred ‘neither the ready power to crush and annihilate them nor the will to call it into action were wanting’. At the end of the Afghan War Lord Ellenborough, who had now succeeded Lord Auckland, accused the amirs of having been obstructive, and sent Sir Charles Napier to Sindh to settle the matter. Napier’s idea of settlement was sequestration and virtual domination. An attack on the British Residency in Sindh provided the occasion for war, in which the British were wholly successful, and at the end of which Sindh was annexed in 1843. There was no conceivable justification for British action in Sindh, and there is nothing to be added to Sir Charles Napier’s statement: ‘We have no right to seize Sindh, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be.’

It has been seen that the first Afghan War and the war for the annexation of Sindh were the result of aggressive action deliberately undertaken by the Governor-General. Far different was the case with regard to the two Sikh Wars which followed a few years after the Sindh adventure. Both were forced upon the reluctant British by Sikh truculence.

The Sikhs had come into being at the beginning of the sixteenth century as a kind of puritan offshoot from Hinduism. Their founder, Guru Nanak, lived entirely for the things of the spirit and attached no importance to material power or to the problem of government. He was concerned solely with the search after truth, and the identification of the self with God, and for those ends he prescribed the age-long formulae of purification, contemplation and a humble heart. The Jats, amongst whom his doctrines were mainly spread, were essentially a practical rather than a mystical people; and though some of the Gurus who succeeded Guru Nanak preserved his spiritual attitude, their followers soon aimed at temporal power and made military discipline their bond of union. The fifth Guru laid the foundations of a close knit Sikh organisation. He made the mistake of interfering in the intrigues for the Mughal throne and thereby brought upon himself and his followers persecution. There was much in common between the original Sikh teachings and the Islamic philosophy of life, but this had not prevented the early growth of antagonism between the Sikhs and the Moslems and from the time of the fifth Guru that antagonism hardened into an undying hatred. This in its turn still further stimulated the military spirit of the Sikhs, and the tenth and last Guru, Govind Singh, devoted his whole energy to the organisation of his followers as a great military community whose lives were dedicated to enmity to Islam. For a long time the Sikhs were held in check by the imperial power, but when in the eighteenth century the Mughal Empire became decadent, the Sikhs established a strong position in the Punjab. They were divided into a large number of petty states, often at war with one another, until at the beginning of the nineteenth century the great military organiser, Ranjit Singh, consolidated them into a kingdom and, more important still, taught his soldiers the science of war. In many ways Ranjit Singh was far from being an admirable character, but he was a born leader of men, with a quick eye for military and political realities. At a comparatively early stage in his rule he decided that the English were too strong for him and he made a treaty by which he undertook never to maintain any substantial force on the left bank of the Sutlej, while the English on their part guaranteed not to interfere with him north of that river. To this treaty he faithfully adhered.

As has so often happened in the East, the stability of his kingdom depended entirely on his own strong personality, and on his death in 1839 it rapidly relapsed into anarchy. Power passed into the hands of rival military factions, who attached themselves to different candidates for the succession. Ultimately the infant Dilip Singh, believed to be a son of Ranjit Singh, was placed upon the throne, and his mother, the notorious Rani Jindan, became Regent, with her lover as minister. Many conflicting influences were at work in the Regent’s court, and it has not yet been made clear which of them led the Sikhs to violate the agreement of 1809. Some writers have maintained that the Rani planned a war with the British as the only possible method of distracting the army from ambitions which might have been dangerous to her; others have maintained that the recent augmentation of the British troops not far from the Sikhs’ frontiers made the Sikhs believe that the English were preparing to invade the Punjab and that she decided to forestall any such action.

Whatever the motive may have been, in December 1845 the Sikhs crossed the River Sutlej and the first Sikh War had begun. It ended two months later with the complete victory of the English at the Battle of Sobraon, and the Governor-General was in a position to dictate terms. Lord Hardinge decided upon a policy of moderation and declined to annex the Punjab. By the Treaty of March 1846 the Sikh territory to the east of the River Bias was ceded to England and Kashmir was made over to Golab Singh, Rajah of Jammu, who was a protégé of the British. It was also agreed that the Sikh Army should be limited to twenty thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry. Sir Henry Lawrence, the new Resident at the Sikh court, acquired considerable influence with the local chieftains or sirdars, and at the end of 1846 a new treaty, which in effect greatly strengthened the position of the Company in the Punjab, was signed.

The policy of moderation was justified inasmuch as it made clear the absence of aggressive intentions on the part of England, but considered from a more practical point of view it was quite unworkable. At the beginning of 1848 this was made clear by an outbreak against the British at Multan, which soon took the form of a Sikh religious war and spread throughout the Punjab. Six months were spent in preparation for war on an adequate scale, and in October 1848 Dalhousie, who was now Governor-General, made his famous proclamation: ‘Unwarned by precedent, uninfluenced by example, the Sikh nation has called for war, and on my word, Sirs, they shall have it with a vengeance.’

The Afghans under Dost Muhammad allied themselves with the Sikhs, but gave little practical aid. In the early stages of the war, although the British were technically victorious at the Battle of Chilianwala, their losses were heavy and the Sikhs perhaps emerged more satisfactorily from this battle than did their opponents. A few weeks later, in February 1849, Lord Gough won a decisive victory over the Sikhs at Gujerat and the war was at an end. The Punjab was annexed and the famous Punjab Commission, which attracted to its service some of the finest Englishmen in India at the time, came into being. It was largely thanks to the efforts of the members of this commission that the Sikhs remained loyal during the critical days of the Mutiny.

A further accession of territory, of an entirely different character, was brought about by the annexation of Oudh in 1856. There have been endless technical controversies about this annexation, and there are some grounds for maintaining that it was in fact contrary to British treaty obligations. The real justification for the annexation of Oudh lay in the gross mismanagement and oppression which had long characterised the rule of the King of Oudh. It may fairly be charged against the British that the protecting mantle that they had cast over Oudh had rendered possible the continuance of gross maladministration, and few people today will defend a system under which the paramount power maintained an evil régime in existence, while refraining from practical interference to alleviate the effects of its misrule. Enemies of the British would see in this system a cynical indifference to Indian welfare. Such a judgment is scarcely justified by the experience of areas in which the British exercised direct control, and a more balanced view is to regard this system as a compromise, made temporarily by a ruling power not yet sufficiently self-confident to undertake the direct administration of a great sub-continent. By 1856 the British Government felt able to undertake this responsibility in respect of Oudh, and the king was removed from his throne, though compensated by a substantial pension.

Dalhousie, like Wellesley, was a great imperialist, and was profoundly convinced that the extension of the rule of Britain was of the greatest benefit to her subjects. It will be necessary in other sections of this book to consider how far that belief was justified by results, but for our immediate purpose it is sufficient to recognise that it was a genuine conviction, and that it underlay the new doctrine of lapse by which Dalhousie considerably expanded the area of British rule. According to this doctrine, if the ruler of a State created by or subordinate to the Company died without natural heirs, his State lapsed to the Company—adopted heirs could only inherit if their adoption had been sanctioned. During his term of office it was applied to six states, of which the most important were Jhansi and Nagpur. In the case of Jhansi, the Rani took dire vengeance at the time of the Mutiny, and perhaps more significant still, her name was a symbol of hatred and rebellion amongst those Indians who in 1943 aligned themselves with the Japanese against Britain in the belief that they were working for the freedom of their country.

Consistently with his general principles, Dalhousie abolished the title of the Nawab of the Carnatic and discontinued the pension of eighty thousand pounds granted to Baji Rao on his deposition from the throne of the Peshwa. The victim of this discontinuance, Baji Rao’s adopted son, commonly known as Nana Sahib, had his revenge at Cawnpore in the time of the Mutiny.

By the annexation of the Punjab and of Oudh, and his regular application of the doctrine of lapse, Dalhousie completed the work of Wellesley, and rounded off the British Empire in India.

Chapter X

The Mutiny

By the end of Dalhousie’s term of office the authority of Britain was established firmly throughout India. Over about two-thirds of the country the Company exercised direct rule, while the remaining one-third was divided between nearly six hundred Indian princes who enjoyed differing degrees of independence and stood in varying relations to the British Crown. In the case of certain states the position was defined by treaty. Some of these treaties gave the Company a limited right of interference in internal administration, while others specifically barred such intervention; all alike, however, left the control of external relations in the hands of the Company. There were other states, the relations of which with the Company were not defined in any document, but which by reason of their insignificance accepted the Company as their practical overlord. Already the doctrine generally known as paramountcy was taking shape, and although it has never been possible to define that doctrine with any accuracy, its practical operation has been adequately described in the famous phrase—‘paramountcy must remain paramount’. Whatever the legal theory might be, when Dalhousie left India in 1856 there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the Company was the effective ruler of the country. To many contemporary observers a stability and permanence which had seldom been known in Indian political history seemed to have been established. Yet within a year of the departure of Dalhousie the whole authority of the Company was challenged, and Britain was faced with the most serious menace which she had yet encountered in India.

The detailed story of the Mutiny and its suppression is not relevant to our purpose, but a brief study of its main causes and of its effects on the relations between the two countries is essential to any understanding of the impact of Britain on India.

It must, in the first place, be recognised that the Mutiny was not a general national rising—it had nothing in common with those nationalist freedom movements which have played so big a part in Asiatic affairs in recent years. How far nationalism or even consciousness of nationality had developed at this stage will be discussed in another section of this book; for the present it is sufficient to point out that the limited area involved, the general indifference of the great mass of civil population, and the attitude of the great Indian princes, all preclude any possibility of regarding the Mutiny as a national uprising. India, south of the River Narbada, remained on the whole remarkably untroubled; Central and East Bengal were quiet throughout: Rajputana remained loyal in spite of local disturbances; while Sindh was unaffected and Afghanistan made no attempt to take advantage of the difficulties of the English. Serious troubles were mainly confined to the Punjab, the valley of the Ganges and connected rivers, and that area including Indor, Bhopal and Jhansi, now known as Central India. The remaining two-thirds of India did not join in rebellion in spite of widespread unrest.

A second important factor in any assessment of the character of the rising is the relatively small part played in it by the civil population. Even in the United Provinces—then part of what were known as the North-West Provinces—where the feeling against authority was probably strongest, only a very small section of the population were actively concerned. The civilians made no serious attempt to hamper the movements of British forces marching to relieve beleaguered garrisons, nor does it appear that British armies found difficulty in obtaining supplies. The significance of this will be clear by comparison with the extreme commissariat difficulty often experienced by police officers in the days of Mr. Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience movement, when a large part of the nation was indeed united against the British. The passive attitude of the civil population was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that a considerable proportion of the Sepoys returned to their own villages, leaving continued rebellion to the more active or more truculent spirits.

A third consideration is the fact that most of the princes of India held entirely aloof from the rebellion. It might have been thought that the great Maratha chiefs would have sought to re-establish their independence, but both Holkar and Sindhia remained loyal even though certain sections of their armies rose in rebellion. A mutiny which affected only one-third of the country, in which the civil population played mainly a passive part, and from which the native rulers remained aloof, cannot rightly be described as a national movement. There was indeed some difference of opinion amongst those mainly concerned with the suppression of the Mutiny as to its origin, and Sir James Outram regarded it as not primarily a military revolt, but to a large extent a civil conspiracy, in which Muslims were the organisers while Hindus allowed their grievances to be exploited. This is not a view which finds favour with most modern historians, British or Indian, and it appears more correct to treat the Mutiny as essentially a revolt of the Army, encouraged and facilitated by the existence of profound discontent amongst some sections of the civil population.

It is not surprising that these discontents should have existed. When the British began to assume power in India, the social and political structure was in an advanced state of disintegration, and all the stresses and strains incidental to such a process were well marked. If India had not suffered foreign invasion, it is possible that after a long period of struggle and chaos the various elements in society would have readjusted themselves, and that a state of equilibrium would once more have been reached. The imposition of foreign authority prevented this process of adjustment and left the social structure in a state of continuing disequilibrium. Some of the stresses and strains were eased in due course by legislation or by Western influence, while others again made themselves manifest when the foreign authority began to withdraw in the twentieth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century they were at their strongest, and the marvel is that the Company should have been able for so long to avoid a serious outbreak.

Apart from this general cause of uneasiness, there were certain special factors at work just before the Mutiny. The foreign policy of Dalhousie, manifested in the annexation of Oudh and in the doctrine of lapse, had profoundly disturbed the representatives of the former ruling houses; the discontinuance of the pension formerly enjoyed by the ex-Peshwa embittered his adopted son, Nana Sahib, who afterwards became one of the most active and malevolent organisers of the Mutiny; while the application of the doctrine of lapse to Jhansi called forth the hostility of the Rani of Jhansi—one of India’s great women soldiers, whose name more than eighty years later was to become a symbol of India’s demand for freedom. The plan to remove the former King of Delhi from his palace had similarly alienated certain sections of the Muslims, and it is significant that one of the first acts of the mutineers was to proclaim Bahadur Shah Emperor of India. The mutineers, however, were in the main Hindus, and so a little later the restoration of the Peshwa and the Maratha glory became one of their objects. The fact that two such divergent aims as the reinstatement of the Mughal emperor and the rehabilitation of the Maratha power could both express themselves in the Mutiny is an indication of the strong and varied political sentiments which had as their greatest common measure dislike of British rule.

Economic factors were also at work. A large number of soldiers in Oudh had been disbanded and left without employment; a reform of the agrarian system based on a desire to make direct settlement with the cultivators had resulted in the dispossession of powerful landlords; while another section of the community was alienated by the increased strength which the English law had given to the position of the money-lender, who was generally a Hindu. Over and above these specific economic grievances was the general fact that foreign rule necessarily narrows the avenues of employment open to the ablest men of the country. Cornwallis had gone so far as to debar Indians from positions of high authority altogether; this decision had indeed been reversed, but it was still true that all important posts were in British hands. Other elements of Hindu society were influenced not so much by these economic and political considerations as by the belief that the growth of Western influence was a threat to their religion. The suppression of sati, the determination of the British authorities to treat all castes as being on the same level before the law, and the zeal of the Christian missionaries were all profoundly disturbing to thinking Hindus. Their minds harked wistfully back to their ancient Hindu traditions and to their more recent hope that the Maratha power might revive Hindu glory. Muslims, on the other hand, dreamed of the past greatness of the Mughal Empire.

To summarise, the imposition of a wholly alien civilisation on a society which was already becoming chaotic, and in which the long-standing struggle between Hinduism and Islam was coming to a head, necessarily produced tension and discontent. This malaise of the civil population might, however, have counted for little if the Army had remained unmoved.

The Bengal Army was not recruited from what is now known as Bengal, for the achievements of the Bengali have always been in the field of intellect rather than war. Bengal in the old sense included all that part of British territory in India which was administered from Calcutta, and the main recruiting ground for the Bengal Army was the kingdom of Oudh. In spite of its splendid years of service in the early days of the Company, the Bengal Army had always been somewhat difficult, perhaps because of the presence in it of a large number of men of high caste. The rules of caste with regard to eating, drinking and travelling must obviously be troublesome in an army once it begins to operate outside its immediate locality of recruitment. Over and above this there was always the difficulty that relations of individuals in the hierarchy of caste might conflict with their respective military ranks. In another work the writer has recorded the deference shown by a Brahman sub-inspector of police to a non-Brahman constable—and the same complicated relationship was more subversive of real discipline in the old Bengal Army than it was many years later in the Bengal Police.

An additional caste difficulty arose when it became necessary to send Indian troops overseas. In 1856 Dalhousie announced that no one should be recruited to the Indian Army unless he was prepared to sign on for service overseas. The regulation was justified and even necessary, but in effect it meant that either serving Indian soldiers must refrain from sending their sons into the Army and so keeping up family tradition, or else they must put up with the caste disabilities which might arise from crossing the sea. Further difficulties had arisen from the first Afghan War. The rigours of the campaign had made the maintenance of caste rules impossible and the large fines which were a condition precedent to readmission to caste had pressed heavily on the Hindu soldiers. The Muslims, on the other hand, were not a little disturbed at being involved in war with men of their own creed.

More serious still was the fact that the mishandling of the Afghan campaign and its disastrous result had seriously lowered the prestige of the English officers in the Army. The situation might have been retrieved in the years following the Afghan War if the general level of military competence had been high, but the attractions of service in the civil branch of government at that time were very strong and there was a marked tendency for the best officers to be withdrawn from regimental duties. As a result of all these factors and of the unsettled frame of mind that always affects soldiers at the end of a war, the Bengal Army was in a very unsatisfactory condition. Dalhousie went so far as to say that ‘the discipline of the Army from top to bottom, officers and men alike, is scandalous’. The great majority of officers were blind to the dangers of the situation, and even at the very time of the outbreak of the Mutiny commanding officers seemed to vie with one another in apparently genuine declarations as to the loyalty of their troops.

It must also be remembered that the increased commitments of the British had led to an expansion of the Indian Army in proportion to the strength of British troops in India. The Indian Army was thus not only in a restive mood but was also conscious of its own power. Under such circumstances the ignorance or the stupidity which led to the issue from Woolwich of cartridges which had been greased with the fat of cows or swine and were therefore offensive to both Hindus and Muslims was sufficient to set fire to the very inflammable material of the Bengal Army.

It is possible that the outbreak might have been stopped by firm and intelligent handling at the start. Unfortunately, the indecision and wavering of some of the local officers was made worse by the hesitation of the Governor-General, Canning, afterwards nicknamed Clemency Canning by his enemies. Canning proved his greatness and liberality by his refusal to submit to demands for vengeance at the end of the Mutiny. He was, however, entirely the wrong man to deal with the outbreak, and he allowed valuable days to go by while he held philosophical discussions with his council as to the principles on which punishments were to be avoided or mercy shown to mutineers. While these discussions were going on, mutiny was spreading apace. It is not necessary for us to follow the grim story of the Mutiny and its suppression. The siege of Delhi, the massacre of Cawnpore and the Relief of Lucknow, which were the focal points of much of the fighting, are too well known to require description. The name of the Nana Sahib, the instigator of the butchery at Cawnpore, will ever remain infamous in the annals of British history, but the impartial historian must equally record how British officers and soldiers, inflamed to madness by the outrages inflicted on women and children of their own community, themselves lost their sense of justice and humanity and inflicted torture without discrimination. Even the great and wise John Nicholson, maddened by the atrocities at Cawnpore, demanded that ‘the flaying alive, impalement or burning of the women and children at Delhi should be legalised’. It is useless to pass judgment on these excesses on both sides. Cruelty begets cruelty, and after a certain stage of suffering and horror justice and judgment give way to the demand for vengeance. All that can be said is that both amongst Indians and English the Mutiny brought out the best and the worst. For one Englishman who spoke of atrocities witnessed, there were many who had tales to tell of the loyalty of Indian friends and soldiers, and of the devotion of Indian servants by whom their children were taken to places of safety.

Within six months of its outbreak the back of the Mutiny had been broken; in less than another year it was at an end, and the power of the Company had been fully restored.

Section II — The Administrative Impact

Chapter XI

Ancient Indian Administration

In spite of its wealth and variety, Indian literature suffers from a serious lack of purely historical works and an even greater lack of contemporary descriptions of ancient political institutions. We do, indeed, get sidelights on this subject from the scriptures and commentaries and to a greater extent from the epics and dramas, but they are far from giving us a clear picture of the machinery of government in early times. For the nearest approach to such a description we have to wait until the time of Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth and third centuries B.C. The Brahman, Chanakya, otherwise known as Kautilya, was both statesman and philosopher. Having in the early part of his life been instrumental in establishing Chandragupta on the throne, in his later years he wrote a treatise on government known as the Arthasastra or Science of Welfare. In spite of its authenticity and great value, this work is in some ways difficult to interpret. In the first place, it purports to be, not a description of any existing political organisation, but ‘a compendium of almost all the Arthasastras, which, in view of acquisition and maintenance of the earth, have been composed by ancient teachers’. Much of it must in fact have been based on the administration of Chandragupta, but it is not always easy to distinguish between descriptions of what is and statements of what ought to be.

In the second place, like so much of Hindu writing, the work is somewhat unanalytical in its character. Elaborate definitions and formal classifications often take the place of any logical analysis, and statements of general political principles are jumbled up with unimportant details of departmental organisation of the kind which would normally be found in a government departmental manual. A further difficulty arises from the essential cynicism of Kautilya, which makes him as unsafe a guide to contemporary Indian thought as Machiavelli—with whom he had much in common—would be to that of sixteenth-century Europe. Kautilya stated frankly that ‘whoever is superior shall wage war. Whoever is rising in power may break the agreement of peace. The king who is situated anywhere upon the circumference of the conqueror’s territories is called the enemy’. This crude belief in aggression is found side by side with the most lofty precepts concerning the duty of a king. The same monarch who is to regard his neighbours as natural enemies is to realise that ‘in the happiness of his subjects lies his happiness; in their welfare his welfare; whatever pleases himself, he shall not consider as good, but whatever pleases his subjects he shall consider as good’. This lofty idealism is characteristic of much of Hindu thought on the subject of kingship, whereas Kautilya’s cynicism is peculiar to himself. Clearly, in interpreting the Arthasastra, considerable allowance must be made for the personal characteristics of Kautilya.

Unfortunately foreign sources do not help us much in forming a picture of early Indian government and administration. Fragments of writings by various Greek writers—and particularly by Megasthenes, the ambassador of Seleukos Nikator to Chandragupta Maurya—have been preserved, but, interesting as they are, they give little detail and only enable us to check up major facts.

Certain broad outlines, nevertheless, emerge from this scanty material and they are to some extent filled in by the evidence of the many edicts carved on rocks and on stone pillars in the time of Asoka, grandson of Chandragupta. It is, in the first place, clear that throughout the early Hindu period Northern India consisted of a very large number of small states. In the time of Alexander, for example, seven separate tribal states existed between those rivers of the Punjab now known as the Jhelum and the Bias, and Megasthenes writes of a hundred and eighteen distinct nations in India. These states varied greatly in character and included monarchies, oligarchies and republics, but certain more or less democratic features existed in most of them in their early days. Popular assemblies exercised varying degrees of influence, and it is believed that in Vedic times the approval of the assembly was necessary for the election of a king.

By about the seventh or eighth century B.C. there was a tendency for larger kingdoms to absorb their smaller neighbours. As this process of consolidation went on popular assemblies became impracticable; the democratic elements in government diminished and the power of the kings increased. The king was, however, by no means a despot. Apart from the recognition of law as something binding on and not created by him, customary respect for the views of his councillors, together with the attention which he had to pay to the opinion of learned Brahmans, effectively limited his authority in early times. As time passed, the position of the king grew stronger and this process was helped by the fact that as the Brahmans gained increasing religious ascendancy their political influence declined.

A further important change in the years between the Vedas and the Maurya dynasty was the decline in the independence of the villages. In the early days the village had been the main political unit and had administered itself. Gradually the king secured greater control, and in due course the right of the monarch to appoint and dismiss the village officers became widely recognised. This is important inasmuch as British rule has often been criticised on the grounds that it broke down village self-government. The truth appears to be that whenever a strong central administration has existed in India village autonomy has suffered.

The inability of the many small states to resist the invasion of Alexander may have facilitated the process of consolidation of kingdoms. At any rate, in the fourth century B.C. Chandragupta Maurya established at least a nominal authority over all India except the extreme south and exercised real power over a good deal of Northern India. Such a widespread monarchy was a new and short-lived experience for India. Men had long been accustomed to the idea of the Chakravartin³ or universal emperor and many Indian kings had aspired to that position. The Chakravartin, however, was not expected to rule in any real sense—he was merely the overlord who might hope to receive tribute and who claimed a very shadowy suzerainty over local kings, whose internal authority continued unimpaired. Chandragupta’s position was something very different. He claimed to rule a large Home Province directly and to exercise, through viceroys, a reasonably effective sovereignty over four or five outlying provinces, covering much of Northern India. His rule brought great benefits, but it also resulted in the destruction of many free institutions, and according to one classical writer Chandragupta ‘changed the name of freedom to that of bondage, for he himself oppressed with servitude the very people he had rescued from foreign domination’.

The Maurya Empire reached its zenith under Asoka, grandson of Chandragupta, known to his contemporaries as Devanampiya, beloved of the Gods. In a manner not easily comprehensible to modern Western minds, Asoka combined the functions of a monarch with those of a member of the Buddhist order of monks. Religion was the driving force of his life and his two great aims were the propagation of Buddhist teaching and the promotion of the spiritual welfare of his subjects. In furtherance of these objects he appointed Censors of the Law of Piety, he abolished the royal hunts and replaced by them by ‘tours of piety’; and he taught the virtue of toleration. For the edification of his subjects many of the principles of Buddhism, together with Asoka’s views of just administration, were carved on pillars or rocks throughout his dominions. Two of the most famous of his edicts throw much light on his administration. The first of them deals with the prompt despatch of business:

‘A long period has elapsed during which in the past business was not carried on or information brought in at all times. So by me the arrangement has been made that at all times, when I am eating, or in the ladies’ apartments, or in my private rooms, or in the mews, or in my conveyance, or in the pleasure grounds, everywhere the persons appointed to give information should keep me informed about the affairs of the people.

‘And in all places I attend to the affairs of the people. And, if, perchance, by word of mouth I personally command a donation or injunction; or, again, when a matter of urgency has been committed to the High Officers, and in that matter a division or adjournment takes place in the Council, then without delay information must be given to me in all places, at all times. Such is my command.’

The second is the famous Edict of Toleration:

‘His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King does reverence to men of all sects, whether ascetics or householders, by gifts and various forms of reverence.

‘His Sacred Majesty, however, cares not so much for gifts or external reverence as that there should be a growth of the essence of the matter in all sects. The growth of the essence of the matter assumes various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech, to wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reasons only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another. By thus acting a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the sects of other people. By acting contrariwise a man hurts his own sect, and does disservice to the sects of other people. For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the splendour of his own, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. Concord therefore is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety as accepted by other people. For this is the desire of His Sacred Majesty that all sects should hear much teaching and hold sound doctrine.

‘Wherefore the adherents of all sects, whatever they may be, must be informed that His Sacred Majesty does not care so much for gifts or external reverence as that there should be growth in the essence of the matter and respect for all sects.

‘For this very purpose are employed the Censors of the Law of Piety, the Censors of Women, the Superintendents of pastures, and other official bodies. And this is the fruit thereof—the growth of one’s own sect and the enhancement of the splendour of the Law of Piety.’

In spite of this strong flavour of piety there is no reason to regard Asoka’s administrative organisation as radically different from that of his grandfather, and it will be sufficient for our purpose to glance briefly at the general administration of the Maurya dynasty.

We have seen that the Maurya Empire was divided into a Home Province under the direct control of the Central Government, and four or five outlying provinces, each under the rule of a viceroy who was, himself, responsible to the Central Government. We know little in detail as to the administration of the viceroys’ provinces, but it is a reasonable guess that it was similar in general structure to that of the Home Province. That administration was highly centralised, elaborately organised and operated by a vast, well-trained and highly paid bureaucracy. It impinged upon the life of the ordinary man at all points. It prohibited the town dweller from being out of doors after a fixed time at night; it regulated prices; ‘it levied tolls and it issued passports. It set up inspectors of female morals; it limited the quantity of liquor which might be sold even to ‘those who are well known and of pure character’; it prescribed the degree of chastisement which a husband might inflict upon a wife of ‘refractive nature’; and it laid down the penalty to be imposed on the prostitute who refused to grant her paramour the favours for which he had paid. Almost every aspect of life was, at least in theory, regulated and controlled, and, as has happened throughout history, this magnification of the functions of the state led to widespread evasion of the law and necessitated the creation of a vast department of espionage.

Kautilya, who devotes four chapters of his Arthasastra to this fascinating subject, lays down that the king shall proceed to create spies ‘under the guise of a fraudulent disciple, a recluse, a householder, a merchant, an ascetic practising austerities, a classmate or a colleague, a firebrand, a poisoner and a mendicant woman’. Of the spy in the guise of a recluse he says: ‘This spy, provided with much money and many disciples, shall carry on agriculture, cattle rearing, and trade on the lands allotted to him for the purpose. Out of the produce and profits thus acquired, he shall provide all ascetics with subsistence, clothing and lodging, and send on espionage such among those under his protection as are desirous to earn a livelihood, ordering each of them to detect a particular kind of crime committed in connection with the king’s wealth, and to report of it when they come to receive their subsistence and wages. All the ascetics shall severally send their followers on similar errands.’ Spying was not limited to the discovery of offences. The content or discontent of subjects was to engage the activity of the spy ‘among those who live upon the grains, cattle and gold of the king, among those who supply the same (to the king), in weal or woe, those who keep under restraint a disaffected relative of the king or a rebellious district, as well as those who drive away an invading enemy or a wild tribe. The greater the contentment of such persons, the more shall be the honour shown to them; while those who are disaffected, shall be ingratiated by rewards or conciliation; or dissension may be sown among them so that they may alienate themselves from each other, from a neighbouring enemy, from a wild tribe, or from a banished or imprisoned prince. Failing this measure, they may be so employed in collecting fines and taxes as to incur the displeasure of the people’. Orphans ‘who are to be necessarily fed by the State’ are to be put to study science, palmistry, sorcery, legerdemain and the like in order that they can act as ‘spies learning by social intercourse’. More interesting still are the revenue spies who, disguised as householders, are to be deputed by the Collector-General to ‘ascertain the validity of the accounts (of the village and District Officers) regarding the fields, houses and families of each village’, and the merchant spies who are to ascertain the quantity and price of the royal merchandise.

Underlying this elaborate system of espionage was the profound belief that government servants must necessarily be dishonest. On this point, indeed, Kautilya is explicit: ‘Just as it is impossible not to taste the honey of the poison that finds itself at the tip of the tongue, so it is impossible for a Government servant not to eat up, at least, a bit of the king’s revenue. Just as fish moving under water cannot possibly be found out either as drinking or not drinking water, so government servants employed in the government work cannot be found out taking money. It is possible to mark the movements of birds flying high up in the sky; but not so is it possible to ascertain the movements of Government servants of hidden purpose. Government servants shall not only be confiscated of their ill-earned hoards, but shall also be transferred from one work to another, so that they cannot either misappropriate government money or vomit what they have eaten up.’ There are, however, apparently exceptions and in the next paragraph it laid down that ‘those who increase the king’s revenue instead of eating it up, and are loyally devoted to him, shall be made permanent in service’. We have no means of determining how far this profound distrust of government servants was the product of Kautilya’s own cynicism or how far it was based on bitter experience, but it is at least unlikely that a constantly recurring attitude of suspicion of government servants could have pervaded the writings of Chandragupta’s principal minister and adviser if the standard of the integrity of the public service had in fact been high. In spite of the apparent outward strength of the Maurya Empire for three generations, it is impossible to read the Arthasastra without feeling that the rulers of the empire suffered from an ever-present sense of insecurity. Ministers, officials and ordinary citizens were all alike objects of distrust and this fact perhaps found its most striking manifestation in the elaborate arrangements prescribed by Kautilya for securing the personal safety of the king.

A high conception of kingly duty is set forth in the Arthasastra and there is reason to believe that the kings of the Maurya dynasty lived up to it. ‘Of a king, the religious vow is his readiness to action; satisfactory discharge of duties is his performance of sacrifice; equal attention to all is the offer of fees and ablutions towards consecration.’ Few kings indeed could observe the exacting timetable drawn up by Kautilya in accordance with his principles that ‘if a king is energetic his subjects will be equally energetic’. Above all, importance is attached to accessibility. ‘When in the court, he shall never cause his petitioners to wait at the door, for when a king makes himself inaccessible to his people and entrusts his work to his immediate officers, he may be sure to engender confusion in business, and to cause thereby public disaffection, and himself a prey to his enemies. . . . All urgent calls he shall hear at once, but never put off; for when postponed they will prove too hard or impossible to accomplish.’

The king, however, was not left alone to bear this heavy burden. He was assisted by a council which consisted of his great officers of state in charge of the various departments and a few others who today would be described as ministers without portfolio. The council was concerned with all aspects of administration, and we are told by Kautilya that ‘all kinds of administrative measures are preceded by deliberation in a well-formed Council’. As another Hindu writer on politics, himself quoted by Kautilya, puts it: ‘No deliberation made by a single person will be successful. . . . The perception of what is not or cannot be seen, the conclusive decision of whatever is seen, the clearance of doubts as to whatever is susceptible of two opinions and the inference of the whole when only a part is seen—all this is possible of decision only by ministers.’ More specifically Kautilya states that ‘means to carry out works, command of plenty of men and wealth, allotment of time and place, remedies against dangers, and final success are the five constituents of every council deliberation’.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard the council as a formal body possessed of specific legal powers. It has indeed been suggested by some writers that the king was not supposed to act without the advice of his council, but Kautilya makes it perfectly clear that the king was in no sense bound to consult the council formally, that he might ask them for their opinion either individually or collectively and indeed Kautilya states that the wise course is to consult three or four ministers. ‘Consultation with a single [minister] may not lead to any definite conclusion in the cases of complicated issues. . . . In deliberating with two ministers, the king may be overpowered by their combined action or imperilled by their mutual dissension. But with three or four ministers he will not come to any serious grief, but will arrive at satisfactory results. With Ministers more than four in number he will have to come to a decision after a good deal of trouble.’ Where, however, it seems desirable he may content himself with deliberating ‘with one or two ministers or by himself’. No doubt the practice varied from time to time and depended largely on the personality of the ruler. When the council was consulted as such, great importance was attached to secrecy and it was said that ‘deliberations in it shall be so carried that even birds cannot see them’.

Each of the great departments of state was under the charge of a minister. With typical Brahman fondness for theoretical definition, Kautilya states that ministerial officers are to be ‘born of high family, influential, well trained in arts, possessed of foresight, wise, of strong memory, bold, eloquent, skilful, intelligent, possessed of enthusiasm, dignity and endurance, pure in character, affable, firm in loyal devotion, endowed with excellent conduct, strength, health and bravery, free from procrastination and fickle-mindedness, affectionate, and free from such qualities as excite hatred and enmity’. Even when the king had chosen his ministers with due attention to this formidable list of qualities, he was still to run no risks, but was to assail his ministers secretly with all manner of temptation and to employ ‘in corresponding works those ministers whose character had been tested under the three pursuits of life—religion, wealth and love—and under fear’. One of the temptations was to be love of women, but Kautilya charmingly goes on the say that ‘never shall the king make himself or his queen an object of testing the character of his councillors’.

The most important ministers were the Mantri, or Prime Minister; the Purohita or High Priest; the Collector-General, who was responsible for collection of revenues; the Treasurer-General, who was the custodian of all state funds; and the Minister of War and Peace, who was in charge of external relations. The position of the commander-in-chief seems to have given rise to a controversy which strangely anticipated the dispute between Kitchener and Curzon more than two thousand years later, for whereas some accounts treat the commander-in-chief as being a minister; at least two ancient Indian writers on political science lay down that he is not to be a minister. By implication Kautilya supports this latter view, for he deals with the duties of the commander-in-chief along with those of superintendents, who were official heads of the departments of State under the control of ministers and who seem to have corresponded to what, in the British Civil Service, are today known as Permanent Under-Secretaries of State. There seem to have been about thirty departments of which perhaps the most important apart from Treasury and Accounts were Commerce, Forests, Coals, Mines, Agriculture and Police. According to at least one of the Hindu law books, the police worked under an admirable system in accordance with which if they failed to detect a thief they themselves had to make good the loss.

Departmental administration under the Mauryas was characterised by one curious feature. Although there was a superintendent in charge of each department, the final authority was exercised by a committee of four or five individuals—though it is not at all clear what the relations between them and the superintendents were.

In a country of the size of India the ordinary man is affected not so much by the remote arrangements of the Central Government as by the power and attitude of local authorities. Unfortunately very little detailed information is available as to the day-to-day working of district administration. As in all periods of Indian history, each village had its own headman, who in the time of the Mauryas was appointed by the Central Government or the viceroy. He was responsible not only for the due maintenance of order in the village but also for the collection of revenue and for ensuring that lands were properly cultivated. He in his turn was under the jurisdiction of the Gopa, who was in charge of anything from five to ten villages, while above the Gopa was a regular hierarchy having as its highest member under the viceroy the Rajuka. This office seems to have corresponded roughly to that of a modern divisional commissioner. The Rajuka, in addition to being responsible for the general welfare of his area, was particularly concerned with survey, land settlement and irrigation. In the Home Province this chain of authority was probably very real, but in the more remote parts of the country there are grounds for thinking that the villages went on very much in the old ways and that the higher authorities were not much interested in them as long as they paid their due revenue.

In the India of the Mauryas the collection of the land revenue was the foundation of administration. Much controversy has grown round the question as to the ownership of land in ancient India. Whatever may be the correct legal view of ownership, it is at least clear that throughout Indian history the king has always been entitled to a fixed share of the produce of the land. In the time of the Mauryas the share of the state was either one-fourth or one-sixth of the produce, but in addition to this there were many other dues and imposts of various kinds. It is unfortunately impossible to write in accurate terms on this subject, for the phrases used by the chroniclers are vague in the extreme, but the student of these times is left with the general impression that land taxation was heavy, though remissions of various kinds were granted when improvements were undertaken.

Over and above these normal demands, we find in Kautilya the saving clause that ‘the king who finds himself in a great financial trouble and needs money may collect revenue by demand’. He is indeed enjoined to restrict his demands to those of his subjects who live in fertile areas, and it is further laid down that these exceptional demands shall be made only once. On the other hand, the Collector-General is authorised to seek subscriptions and it is cynically suggested by Kautilya that ‘by causing a false panic owing to the arrival of an evil spirit on a tree in the city, wherein a man is hidden making all sorts of devilish noises, king’s spies under the guise of ascetics may collect money (with a view to propitiate the evil spirit and send it back)’. Or again, ‘spies may call upon spectators to see a serpent with numberless heads in a well connected with a subterranean passage, and collect fees from them for the sight’. There was indeed no end to the ways in which the king’s officers might raise money when the needs of the state demanded—and perhaps in this respect the passage of the centuries has wrought little change.

Law and the administration of justice, as well as the organisation of the army, will be discussed later in this book, and in this chapter we are only concerned with the civil administration of the government in ancient India. It has been made clear that in the empire of the Mauryas bureaucracy was highly developed and that the town dweller, at least, had his life regulated in a manner which would now be considered oppressive, while the burden of taxation was by no means light. On the other hand, India under the Mauryas enjoyed a fair degree of law and order and an unwonted measure of peace, in marked contrast to the chaos which rapidly supervened on the death of Asoka. The administration of the Mauryas was far from typical of the art of government in ancient India. In the extent of its jurisdiction, in its efficiency and centralisation, and in its stability for at least three generations, it must be regarded as an unusual episode in Indian history. The somewhat detailed attention paid to it in this chapter is justified by the fact that it provides the only opportunity we have for anything like detailed study of large-scale administration under the Hindus. For centuries after, all is dark until we reach the period of the Muslim invasions.

Chapter XII

Mediaeval Indian Administration

In our study of the impact of Britain on India it would be satisfactory if we could trace the development of administration from the time of the Mauryas through the later Hindu period, examine the modifications made by the early Muslim kings of Delhi and the great Mughal emperors, and then consider how far British administrative systems in India can be regarded as a continuation of an age-long pattern. Unfortunately the material for such a study does not exist. Contemporary annalists are obsessed with war and dynastic struggles, or with religious and social controversies, and throw little light on the organisation of government. It is indeed impossible to get anything like a clear picture of the government machine before the time of the Mughals. We do not even know how much of the highly developed administration of the Mauryas survived the break-up of their empire, though it seems clear that something corresponding to the Mauryan official hierarchy must have existed in the powerful Hindu kingdoms which struggled for power in succeeding centuries.

When in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. the brilliance of the Gupta dynasty throws a transient light on contemporary political conditions, the picture which we see is not that of despotic rule. The Guptas were assisted by a large number of ministers; and although it is doubtful whether the ministers sat formally as a council, the fact that some of them had made their position hereditary is clear evidence as to their importance. Below the ministers there was an official hierarchy, generally similar to that of the Mauryas and ultimately based on the administration of each village by a headman with whom was associated the village assembly. The jurisdiction of the headman and assembly seems to have been rather wider than that of local self-governing bodies in modern times, and included not only water supply and local communications but justice—within limits—and public affairs generally. The village assembly in many cases consisted not of the entire population of the village but of representatives and acknowledged leaders, but we do not know how they were chosen. The general impression derived from the scanty records available is that of a Government whose yoke did not press too heavily on ordinary people. The Chinese pilgrim, Fa-hien, who travelled through the Gupta Empire at the beginning of the fifth century, recorded his view that the people were numerous and happy, and added: ‘They have not to register their households or attend to any magistrates and their rules. The king governs without decapitation or other corporal punishment.’

During the late Hindu period the idea of monarchy was in the ascendant. One by one the numerous republics, which had at an earlier period maintained a proud and independent existence, were conquered by neighbouring kings, or themselves, after the manner of the Israelites, felt the need of kingship. At the same time, the power of the kings and their ability to dispense with the old traditional restraints, increased. The theory of the divine character of kingship grew rapidly and gave rise to the bitter complaint by a celebrated Brahman writer that ‘though subject to mortal conditions kings look on themselves as having alighted on earth as divine beings with a superhuman destiny; they employ a pomp in their undertakings only fit for gods and win the contempt of all mankind . . . from the delusion of their own divinity established in their minds they are overthrown by false ideas’.

The growth of despotic power did not lead to better or even firmer administration. Indeed, after the time of the Guptas conditions in many respects deteriorated. In the words of a distinguished modern historian, Ishwari Prasad,⁴ ‘India became a bundle of states which were to all intents and purposes independent’, and within many of these states law and order largely broke down. Those local rulers who lasted long enough to have a policy at all endeavoured to deal with the great increase in crimes against person and property by making the penal code more severe, but as a rule these measures failed, and insecurity and confusion were characteristic of most of the kingdoms during the latter centuries of Hindu rule.

The Muslim invasions and the establishment of the Pathan kingdom at Delhi naturally strengthened the earlier trend towards a magnification of the position of the kings. Henceforth the power of the king was based on military strength rather than on the will of the people. He combined in his own person the legislative, judicial, administrative and military functions at the highest level.

Except to the extent to which the King of Delhi was restrained by the teaching of the Quran, his will was law, and he was in no sense legally bound to pay attention to the advice of his ministers. In practice, however, the relation between the king and his ministers depended on personal factors, and during much of this period the Vakil, or Prime Minister, was almost as powerful as the king. The other ministers seem to have been heads of departments rather than policy makers or counsellors of the king. The organisation of spies which had been so marked a feature of the Maurya administration also played an important part under the Pathan kings of Delhi and was supplemented by severe criminal laws and the frequent use of torture. The revenue system will be discussed in another section of this book, and here we need only note that the incidence of taxation, in one form or another, seems to have been higher than during the Hindu period. It must, however, be emphasised that between the first Muslim invasion and the establishment of the Mughal Empire no generalisation about administration or any aspect of government can be satisfactory—regicide and rebellion were the order of the day; the occupants of the Delhi throne changed almost more frequently than did their frontiers, and the form of administration and the relation of government to the people depended almost wholly upon the personality of the individual ruler and the stability or instability of his position. The provincial rulers under the Delhi kings were themselves almost despots, sometimes under the control of the Central Government, but more often practically independent of it, except for payment of revenue. Other areas were still ruled by their former Hindu chiefs, and it may be that in those areas the relations of government with the ordinary man were not much changed by the Muslim invasion. In the areas under direct Muslim rule, however, the semi-despotic character of the monarchy established a great gulf between the king and his people and made it unlikely that the system could endure. The one element of continuity was provided by the village communities, which to a great extent managed their own affairs, but even here, wherever the ruler was strong enough to do so he brought the village headman under his own control, while as the centuries passed the local revenue officers and other agents of the monarchy interfered still more actively in village affairs.

Chapter XIII

Mughal Administration (1)

From the accession of Akbar in 1556 until after the death of Aurangzib in 1707 the Mughal Empire displayed a degree of political and administrative continuity quite unusual in Indian history. Among the earlier Muslim rulers of Delhi there had, indeed, been a few brilliant administrators whose minds turned in the direction ultimately followed by Akbar; but nearly always their reforms perished in the anarchy following their death, or were repudiated by those who came after them. It is the great glory of the Mughal Empire that the Emperor Akbar established, and his three great successors maintained, an administrative system which had in it such power and vitality that not even the chaos of the eighteenth century could wholly destroy it. It lingered on and was taken over in large measure—and revivified—by the early British administrators. The characters of the four great Mughal rulers differed greatly from one another, and under their control the system varied considerably in detail, and even in spirit, from reign to reign. To Akbar it was an instrument of conquest and unification; under the pleasure-loving Jahangir the framework was loosened; Shahjahan restored some of the earlier rigidity; while Aurangzib tightened control still further and, indeed, turned the administration into an instrument of tyranny for the greater glory of God. Through all this the essential character of the system remained, so that it is possible to speak of ‘the Mughal administration’.

Fortunately we are far better informed about this epoch than about any of the early periods of Indian history. Not only have we many contemporary native records, but there are also numerous reports by European travellers, while these again are supplemented by the observations of those servants of the East India Company to whom it fell to take on the succession to the Mughal administration. By far the most important authority for this period is the Ain-i-Akbari—or Institutes of Akbar—written by the emperor’s wise and devoted counsellor, Abul Fazl ’Allami. For twenty-five years Abul Fazl assisted in the organisation of the realm and in the emperor’s fight against orthodox intolerance, and his murder in 1602 at the instigation of Akbar’s son was one of the bitterest blows that the aged emperor had to endure. Towards the end of his life Abul Fazl compiled a vast historical work known as the Akbarnamah, and the Ain-i-Akbari, which forms the third volume of that work, contains a detailed account of the organisation of the empire. Like so many Indian historical works, it is disorderly in its arrangement, and gives equal prominence to small technical details and broad administrative principles. It does, however, enable us to construct a vivid picture of the machinery of government, and its value is vitiated less by flattery and servility than most of the annals of that time.

Another important authority is the contemporary annalist known as Al-Badauni. His Selections from Histories is an entertaining work, but perhaps its greatest value is that, as Badauni was prejudiced against Akbar and hated Abul Fazl, his work supplies a satisfactory corrective to the Ain and the Akbarnamah.

Foremost amongst the European travellers in the Mughal Empire is the famous French physician, François Bernier. He was an acute and penetrating observer, and eight years of service with a great noble at the court of Shahjahan gave him unrivalled opportunities for observation. Bernier was remarkably free from prejudice and, fortunately for us, interested himself particularly in the problem of government. A host of other European travellers have written of the Mughal Empire, but none has excelled Bernier in impartiality and clarity of thought.

From these Indian and European records we are able to form a fairly accurate conception of the principles and practice of the Mughal administration and to realise that it had five main characteristics.

The first noteworthy characteristic of the Mughal Empire was that, like its successor the East India Company, it was in origin a foreign domination. Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur, the founder of the dynasty, was descended from Turks and Mongols—two Central Asian people who, in spite of much intermarriage, had retained their distinctive languages and customs. His son, Humayun, married a Persian princess, and the blood of three races thus flowed in the veins of the Emperor Akbar. Each of these races was completely foreign to India, and Akbar was as much a non-Indian by birth and early training as were Clive and Hastings.

India at this time was essentially Hindu, and the difference of religion inevitably accentuated the distinction of race. It is true that Akbar at an early stage in his reign sought to identify himself with the interests of his Hindu subjects and to set up what in modern terms might almost be described as a secular state; but he was only partially successful, and his work was largely undone in the time of his grandson Shahjahan and his great-grandson Aurangzib. Once again the Mughal Empire became a frankly Islamic state.

Religion complicated matters in another way. Islam, then as now, was divided into the sects of Sunnis and Shiahs, who differed as to the true succession to the Prophet. This abstract disagreement led to hostility and bitterness as great as that which divided the Arians from the Catholics in the early days of Christendom. Akbar and his family were Sunnis, while many of his courtiers and principal lieutenants, by reason of their Persian origin, were Shiahs. This was of great moment when the emperor was struggling with the Persians or with the Southern Kingdom of Golkonda, where the Shiah sect predominated amongst the principal officers of the king. Akbar was thus not only a foreigner in India but also a member of a special sect, which had to maintain its position against many enemies, even amongst the Muslims in India, at a time when the Muslims formed a small proportion of the total population.

His position was in fact sustained by the complete despotism which is the second important characteristic of Mughal rule. We have already seen that the power of the king had been growing throughout the previous millennium, and under the early Mughals it reached its zenith. The emperor’s will was law in the most literal sense. It is true that in theory he was expected to follow Islamic principles, but in this matter his own conscience was the sole judge. In the words of the author of the Ain-i-Akbari: ‘A king possesses, independent of men, the ray of divine wisdom, which banishes from his heart everything that is conflicting.’ This may have been partly the language of flattery, but it is abundantly clear that the absolute power of the emperor was universally recognised by his subjects. No popular institutions existed to protest against his actions, and the members of the large and highly paid bureaucracy had no legal rights or power apart from the will of the emperor. Never was the divine right of kings to govern wrong more clearly recognised. It was possible to rebel, but it was not possible to assert that the king was wrong.

It is not surprising that a foreign despotic rule of this character should have established administration on military lines. Rank in the Imperial Government was closely correlated to the number of troops maintained by the individual noble and even officials employed wholly in civil duties were graded in the military hierarchy. The system under which every important official had assigned to him the responsibility for maintaining and commanding a stated number of troops was Persian in origin. It was, indeed, not unknown in India, but after 1573 Akbar made it the foundation of his administration, and it can properly be regarded as the third main feature of the Mughal period.

The commanders were known as mansabdars or place holders, and were graded as mansabdars of ten thousand, five thousand, one thousand and so on down to ten. Only members of the royal family might be mansabdars of the two highest grades, but the lower classes provided a career open to talent. In theory there were sixty-six grades, but that number appears to have been officially laid down merely because it corresponded with ‘the value of the letters in the name of Allah, which is an announcement of eternal bliss’. In practice there were apparently about thirty grades.

The mansabdars were not, in fact, required to maintain the theoretical number of troops assigned to their rank. A commander of five thousand was perhaps not usually expected to maintain more than one thousand cavalry. His actual responsibility in this respect was generally laid down in writing, and it would be recorded of a particular mansabdar that he was ‘a commander of five thousand by rank and in actual command of three thousand cavalry’. Some mansabdars, on the other hand, maintained more troops than their statutory number, and in return were given a higher rank inside their own mansab; thus a mansabdar of say five thousand might be of the first, second or third grade. There were also further distinctions depending on what proportion of a mansabdar’s troopers maintained more than one horse, and the pay of a mansabdar in a particular grade appears to have been determined to some extent by his actual liabilities.

Their net salaries, after deducting the cost of their establishments, must have been large, and Blochmann, the translator of the Ain-i-Akbari, calculates that a first-grade mansabdar of five thousand, drawing a salary of Rs.30,000 per mensem, would incur monthly charges of Rs.10,637, while a first-grade mansabdar of a hundred would receive Rs.700 per mensem, and have to spend Rs.313 per mensem.

Even these high net salaries were not sufficient to prevent mansabdars from shirking their responsibilities; and according to Irvine, in his fascinating book The Army of the Moghuls: ‘False musters were an evil which the Moghul Army suffered even in its most palmy days. Nobles would lend each other the men to make up their quota, or needy idlers from the bazaars would be mounted on the first baggage pony that came to hand and counted in with the others as efficient soldiers.’ Badauni, a contemporary historian and a very bitter critic of Akbar, has the following passage:

‘But notwithstanding this new regulation, the condition of the soldiers got worse, because the Amirs did what they liked; for they put most of their own servants and mounted attendants into soldiers’ clothes, brought them to the musters, and performed everything according to their duties. But when they got their jágirs, they gave leave to their mounted attendants, and when a new emergency arose, they mustered as many “borrowed” soldiers as were required, and sent them again away, when they had served their purpose. Hence while the income and expenditure of the Mansabdar remained in statu quo, “dust fell into the platter of the helpless soldier”, so much so, that he was no longer fit for anything. But from all sides there came a lot of low trades-people, weavers, and cotton-cleaners, carpenters, and green-grocers, Hindu and Musalman, and brought borrowed horses, got them branded and were appointed to a Mansab, or were made Kroris (vide p. 13,15, from below), or Ahadis, or Dakhills to some one; and when a few days afterwards no trace was to be found of the imaginary horse and the visionary saddle, they had to perform their duties on foot.’

The author of the Ain says: ‘Horses answering the description in the rolls were even hired and substituted for the old ones.’ A system of branding with numbers was therefore introduced, and in the seventh Ain Abul Fazl tells us charmingly that ‘the soldiers thus learnt to be honest’.

Most important officials were included in this military hierarchy of mansabdars—not only were the provincial governorships held by mansabdars of high rank, but we are told in the twenty-seventh Ain that even in the imperial kitchen ‘Nobles, Ahadis and other military are employed’.

It was indeed natural that the basis of the state should be military, for Akbar’s first aim was to extend his power as widely as possible. At the beginning of his reign his kingdom was comparatively insignificant. Most of India north of the Vindhya mountains was at that time ruled by Afghans or by independent Hindu princes, while further south the Deccan states and the kingdom of Vijayanagar were completely independent and at least as powerful as the kingdom of Delhi. In the face of all probabilities Akbar set out to conquer India, and this aim necessarily conditioned his organisation of the system of government. Too little attention has been paid by many English writers to this aspect of Akbar’s policy. There has indeed been a tendency to sentimentalise over this great emperor and to write as though the welfare of his subjects was his only thought. In reality the dominant motive of his life was conquest. He himself tells us frankly that ‘a monarch should be ever intent on conquest lest his neighbours rise against him’ and to some extent this was true of all the Mughals. Expansionism must be regarded as the fourth main characteristic of Mughal rule.

The fifth striking feature of the Mughal Empire was the complete absence of an hereditary aristocracy. The omrahs, or nobles, held their position and their territorial grants only at the pleasure of the emperor. Their properties passed to him at their death, and it became almost a matter of state policy not to allow the heirs of nobles to succeed to their posts. Bernier was much struck with this fact.

‘It must not be imagined that the Omrahs or Lords of the Mogol’s court are members of ancient families, as our nobility in France. The King being proprietor of all the lands in the empire, there can exist neither Dukedoms nor Marquisates; nor can any family be found possessed of wealth arising from a domain and living upon its own patrimony. The courtiers are often not even descendants of Omrahs, because the King being heir of all their possessions, no family can long maintain its distinction, but, after the Omrah’s death, is soon extinguished, and the sons, or at least the grandsons, reduced generally, we might say, to beggary, and compelled to enlist as mere troopers in the cavalry of some Omrah. The King, however, usually bestows a small pension on the widow, and often on the family; and if the Omrah’s life be sufficiently prolonged, he may obtain the advancement of his children by royal favour, particularly if their persons be well formed, and their complexions sufficiently fair to enable them to pass for genuine Mongols. But this advancement through special favour proceeds slowly, for it is an almost invariable custom to pass gradually from small salaries, and inconsiderable offices, to situations of greater trust and emolument. The Omrahs, therefore, mostly consist of adventurers from different nations who entice one another to the court; and are generally persons of low descent, some having been originally slaves, and the majority being destitute of education. The Mogol raises them to dignities, or degrades them to obscurity, according to his own pleasure and caprice.’

This lack of any long-established or hereditary aristocracy had two main effects. In the first place, it strengthened the despotic power of the monarchy; while, secondly, it meant that when, after the death of Aurangzib, the empire passed into the hands of weaklings, there remained no stabilising element in the kingdom. In the early days of the empire, however, it gave Akbar a free hand to refashion administration in a scientific manner. It will be convenient here to study briefly the results of that process.

Inasmuch as all power resided in the emperor, his ministers had no constitutional functions of their own right; they were the emperor’s advisers when he chose to consult them, and his assistants in whatever branch of administration he delegated to them. In practice, however, they were often very important. Chief amongst them was the Vakil, or Prime Minister, described by Abul Fazl as ‘the emperor’s lieutenant in all matters connected with the realm and the household’. Next came the Wazir or Diwan, who might in modern terms be described as the Finance Minister, and of whom we are told in the Ain that ‘he is the lieutenant of the Emperor in financial matters, superintends the imperial treasuries, and checks all accounts’. Although his charge was in a sense an independent one, ‘whatever is beyond his own ability he refers to the Vakil’.

Having told us that the Wazir must be ‘a member of the Divine Faith, a skilful arithmetician, free from avarice, circumspect, warm-hearted, abstinent, active in business, pleasing in his style, clear in his writings, truthful, a man of integrity, condescending, zealous in his work’, the author of the Ain brings us to an anti-climax by telling us that the Wazir ‘is in reality a bookkeeper’. The other most important ministers were the Sadr, whom Blochmann described as a combination of Chief Justice, Chief Inquisitor and Controller of Ecclesiastical Patronage, and the Chief Baksi, who was both Paymaster-General and Chief Recruiting Officer, as well as, in some respects, what we should call Adjutant-General.

Important as were these great officers of state, neither they nor the other courtiers were ever allowed to forget their complete subordination to the emperor. Bernier tells us that ‘every Omrah at court is obliged, under a certain penalty, to repair twice a day to the assembly, for the purpose of paying his respects to the King, at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, when he is there seated to dispense justice, and at six in the evening’.

After Akbar had assumed the position of spiritual guide of the Muslims of India, the ceremony of subservience was still further exaggerated, and prostration before the emperor became for a time the custom at court. This was most repugnant to orthodox Muslim sentiment, and, as Abul Fazl rather naïvely puts it, ‘some perverse and dark-minded men look upon prostration as blasphemous man-worship’. Prostration was, therefore, discontinued in public, though continued in the private audience-chamber.

By 1570 Akbar’s position north of the Vindhyas had been sufficiently consolidated to permit of more scientific organisation, and in that year he divided the empire into twelve provinces or subas, a number which was increased to fifteen towards the end of the reign when part of the Deccan had been conquered. Each province was under the control of a governor, who, perhaps because his military functions were the most important in the early days, was called the sipahsalar, or commander-in-chief. Later he came to be known as subadar, but, whatever his designation, until 1594—when the Provincial Revenue Administration was placed under a Diwan, responsible direct to the Imperial Wazir—he exercised all power in the province, subject only to the control of the emperor. The Ain-i-Akbari records that ‘he is the Vicegerent of His Majesty. The troops and people of the province are under his orders, and their welfare depends upon his just administration’. He was responsible for the protection of the province against external or internal rebellion, for the maintenance and discipline of the army, for the preservation of law and order, for the collection of revenue, and at least in theory for ‘the increase of agriculture and the flourishing condition of the land. . . .’ The subas were divided into sarkars or districts, each under the charge of a fauzdar, who combined, with some of the functions of a modern magistrate and collector, the duties of a military commander.

The unsettled state of the outlying districts in much of Akbar’s reign is illustrated by the prominence given in the instructions to the fauzdar’s duty of suppressing rebels. In the second Ain of the third book this duty is set forth in some detail.

‘As a subordinate and assistant he holds the first place. Should a cultivator or a collector of the crown lands or an assignee of government estates prove rebellious, he should induce him to submit by fair words, and if this fail, he shall take the written evidence of the principal officers and proceed to chastise him. He should pitch his camp in the neighbourhood of the body of rebels and at every opportunity inflict loss upon their persons and property but not risk at once a general engagement. If the affair can be concluded with the infantry he should not employ cavalry. He should not be rash in attacking a fort, but encamp beyond bowshot and the reach of its guns and musketry, and obstruct the roads of communication. He should be vigilant against night attacks and devise a place of retreat, and be constant in patrolling. When he has captured the rebel camp, he must observe equity in the division of the spoil and reserve a fifth for the royal exchequer. If a balance of revenue be due from the village, this should be first taken into account.’

In his judicial and magisterial duty the fauzdar was assisted by a qazi, who was partly an investigator and partly a judge—and by a mir a’dl, whose duty it was to carry out the findings of the qazi. It is interesting to note that the acumen and judgment of an experienced officer were considered surer methods of discovering truth than a procedure based on sworn testimony, and possibly many experienced district officers in recent years would have agreed with this view. In the third Ain of the third book, it is laid down that ‘this person must not be content with witnesses and oaths. . . . From the excessive depravity of human nature and its covetousness, no dependence can be placed on a witness or his oath’.

In the towns, law and order were maintained by a kolwal, on whom many responsibilities were placed. We are told in the fourth Ain of the third book that he was to organise night patrols, keep a register of houses and frequented roads, take note of the comings and goings of strangers, ‘observe the income and expenditure of the various classes of men’, and superintend the guild of artificers. Moreover, ‘when night is a little advanced, he should prohibit people from entering or leaving the City. He should set the idle to some handicraft’. Here, too, we have a repetition of the excellent rules laid down under the Maurya dynasty with regard to thefts. The kotwal ‘shall discover thieves and the goods they have stolen or be responsible for the loss’. He should control prices, allow no sales outside the city, prevent the rich from buying too much, inspect weights and measures, and restrain people from making or buying or selling wine. He was to ‘prohibit women from riding on horseback’; to expel ‘religious enthusiasts, calendars and dishonest tradesmen’; and to ‘amputate the hand of any who is the pot-companion of an executioner, and the finger of such as converse with his family’. But with all this, he is to ‘refrain from invading the privacy of domestic life’. This respect for privacy, however, was modified in practice by the instruction that ‘he should appoint as a spy one among the obscure residents with whom the other should have no acquaintance, and, keeping their reports in writing, employ a heedful scrutiny’. There were, in fact, few departments of human life that did not come under his watchful eye—and some conception of his power may be gained from the position of the kotwal in certain Indian cities even in the twentieth century.

As we have seen, the defence organisation of the empire was mainly built round the mansabdars, but that system was supplemented in three ways. In the first place, the emperor found it necessary to maintain a standing army under his own direct control and paid by him. This army was never very large, though it is said at one time to have consisted of forty-five thousand cavalry. Most authorities have estimated its normal strength in the time of Akbar at about twenty thousand.

Secondly there was a body of ahadis or gentlemen troopers, ‘brave and worthy persons whom His Majesty does not appoint to a Mansab but whom he frees from being under the orders of any one’. Such persons ‘are dignified by their independence’. There are said to have been seven thousand of these ahadis in the time of Shahjahan, i.e. about the middle of the seventeenth century. It is almost impossible to discover any reliable figures for the size of the mansabdars’ forces, but there is some ground for thinking that, in Aurangzib’s time, the total cavalry at the disposal of the emperor amounted to two hundred thousand.

Much of the country was not controlled directly or through imperial viceroys, but continued to be ruled by the original chiefs. In many cases these were Hindus, who, in return for their internal independence, furnished substantial military aid. It would have been almost impossible, both from an administrative and from a military point of view, to bring under direct or viceregal rule all the vast area over which the emperor exercised general authority. When new territory was conquered it would perhaps be left under the semi-independent rule of the original chieftain, who offered ceremonial homage and provided a contingent of troops on demand. These feudatory rulers played a very important part in the struggle for the expansion of empire, particularly so under Akbar, who set himself to win the loyalty of his Hindu chiefs. The chiefs themselves frequently held high military or civil posts in the administration. Cavalry formed the only effective part of the army, the infantry in general being little more than camp followers or peasants persuaded or dragooned into temporary service. The classes listed as infantry in the fourth Ain of the second book included, for example, porters, runners, wrestlers, palanquin bearers and others who in a modern army would be classified as pioneers or engineers. Elephants were of great military importance and elaborate regulations regarding their maintenance were laid down in the Ain. There were also what might be called provincial forces, maintained by fauzdars and other local officers for purposes which in British times would have been described as internal security, but practically nothing is known as to their extent or organisation. The other most important aspect of administration is that concerned with land revenue. Mughal land revenue administration is so important, both intrinsically and because of its influence on the British period, that it must form the subject of a separate chapter.

Chapter XIV

Mughal Administration (2): Revenue

However much the Muslim invasions may have altered the pattern of Indian life in some respects, in the matter of land revenue no revolutionary change occurred. It is true that the incidence of the government demand on the peasant increased, but it continued to be based on principles and procedures to which he was accustomed and which he took for granted.

In the Hindu period the accepted bases of land-holding were: the duty of the peasant to cultivate, the obligation of the king to protect him, and the duty of the cultivator, in return for this protection, to pay a customary share of the produce of the soil. Whether this was paid as rent to the king in his capacity of owner of all land in the kingdom or whether it should be regarded as a tax paid to the state is an interesting but, in a sense, unreal subject for discussion. No distinction of this kind existed in the mind either of the peasant or the king—default in payment was merely an aspect of disloyalty or rebellion. Moreover, although procedures less cumbersome than actual physical sharing were from time to time devised, it was never forgotten that what was due to the king was a share of the peasant’s actual production.

In a legal sense the peasant was perhaps not the owner of his land, but it was, in fact, his to deal with as he pleased, provided he cultivated it and paid the revenue. He could sell or transfer it, his heirs could inherit it and he could grow on it whatever crops he liked. As against the king, however, the peasant had perhaps no rights. The subject is still very obscure, but there are some grounds for thinking that he could be ejected by the king. Moreland, the chief modern authority on this matter, calls attention to Kautilya’s recommendation that cultivators should be ejected for laziness or inefficiency, as well as to another text which speaks of ‘the king’s action in taking land from one man and giving it to another’.

In practice, the cultivator in general had a great measure of security of tenure during most of the Hindu period. There was much uncultivated land and the demand for tillers of the soil was greater than the supply. The king and his agents were naturally concerned to increase the revenue, and the tendency was, therefore, not to dispossess peasants but rather to persuade them to take more land or to force them to cultivate their existing holdings. Since revenue depended on production, uncultivated land was a dead loss to the king.

These principles fitted in well with the Islamic concept of what was due from a conquered non-Muslim people. As we have seen earlier, there were some orthodox Muslim divines who maintained that non-Muslims should be offered only the choice between Islam or death. This view was clearly impracticable as a policy of state, and the Muslim invaders of India followed the less rigorous principle that conquered infidels should pay tribute, as distinct from the more moderate tithe which might be levied on Muslim subjects. Apart from other imposts, the tribute took the form of a share of the produce of the soil, and the Islamic approach to land-holding in India thus accorded well with the ancient Hindu theory and practice of the king’s right to a specified share of the yield.

Under the Muslims, as during the Hindu period, the peasant was mainly concerned with three aspects of his relations with the ruler, namely: what share of the produce was due to the king? how was it to be assessed and in what form was it to be paid? who was to receive it?

It is impossible to trace in any detail the variation in the share of his produce demanded from the cultivator from one reign to another. In early Hindu times limits were imposed by the Sacred Law on the proportion which the king might justly take, but it is not very clear what those limits were. Some authorities suggest that one-sixth to one-twelfth were the normal limits, but there were adequate provisions for substantial increases in times of emergency.

Islamic theory imposed no limitation of this kind. The king was free to demand whatever he thought fit, and the Moslem attitude towards the infidel payers of tribute would naturally lead to increased rather than decreased demands. Ala-ud-din, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, laid down that ‘on all cultivation, whether on a small or large scale . . . half [of the produce] was to be paid without any diminution’. In addition, grazing and other dues were levied and the cultivator was hard put to it to meet his obligations. Ala-ud-din’s successor lowered the demand and it seems to have remained stationary at about one-third during most of the Muslim period, until the reign of Aurangzib in the second half of the seventeenth century, when it rose, in some areas, to as much as a half. There seems, in fact, to have been a certain degree of elasticity about these matters, and we learn that in the Deccan, in the seventeenth century, ‘half the produce was claimed for crops depending on the rain, one-third for crops irrigated from wells and from one-fourth to one-ninth for the various high-grade crops, such as sugar-cane or poppy’.

This establishment of different rates for different kinds of crops seems to have been characteristic of Muslim, as distinct from Hindu, revenue administration, and was apparently in line with Islamic thought on this subject in other countries. It is interesting to note that in the fourteenth century it led the king, Muhammad Tughlaq, to interfere with the freedom of the cultivator to grow what crop he pleased. Superior crops were to replace inferior wherever possible. This experiment does not appear to have been continued by succeeding kings.

The theoretical share of produce due from the cultivator being known, it remained to determine the actual quantity of grain to be collected from each particular field. The physical process of sharing at the time of harvest, or of agreeing by inspection of the standing crop as to the quantity due, involved two practical difficulties. The first of them arose from the large number of fields which had to be inspected, more or less simultaneously, by a comparatively small staff, while the second consisted in the tremendous opportunities for corruption which it put into the hands of revenue subordinates. To avoid these difficulties, early in the Hindu period recourse was had to the simpler method of accepting a standard yield per unit of area for each particular kind of grain. It was then only necessary to apply this figure to the area sown, though allowance might have to be made afterwards for crop failures. The area sown could be determined at any time before harvest and the process could thus be spread over a fairly long period.

Both methods—actual sharing and application of a standard figure of yield—continued to be used throughout the Hindu and the early Muslim periods, but in the sixteenth century Sher Shah insisted on the adoption of the standard yield principle throughout most of the kingdom. He also introduced a refinement into its calculation. In respect of each particular food-grain, estimates were made of normal yield from ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘middling’ land and the average of the three figures was taken as the standard yield. Unfortunately we do not know if one standard yield was taken throughout the empire or if the figures quoted in the Ain refer to one particular locality only.

At the beginning of Akbar’s reign the same system of calculating the standard yield was in force, but it is now clear that one schedule was used for the whole kingdom. By 1570 or 1571, however, this had been found to be unsatisfactory and the standard yield was therefore worked out separately for every pargana.

If revenue had continued to be paid in kind this would have been the end of the matter, but from the beginning of Akbar’s reign cash payments were demanded. There was nothing new about this—payment in cash and in grain had alternated, or been permitted or enforced simultaneously, throughout much of the Muslim era. At the beginning of that period payment in cash seems to have been more common, but when in the fourteenth century Ala-ud-din set himself to reduce prices, he considered it essential to obtain physical possession of supplies, and for this purpose he directed cultivators in Delhi and certain other provinces to pay half their revenue in kind. His successors did not continue this regulation, but in the sixteenth century Ibrahim Lodi again insisted on payment in kind.

It will be remembered that the original obligation of the cultivator was to pay a share of his actual produce. If payment was everywhere to be in the form of the cash equivalent, two processes were necessary: Firstly, the standard yield had to be fixed; and, secondly, the price at which the grain should be commuted to cash had also to be settled. Akbar now took the second of these tasks in hand.

The main authorities for this transaction are the Ain-i-Akbari and the Akbarnamah. They are difficult to follow, and leave much obscure. It appears that in the early years of his reign Akbar instituted the practice of fixing uniform prices throughout the empire for the commutation of the grain demand. This method was bound to result in severe hardship in some areas, and the comment of Abul Fazl that ‘this mode was attended with considerable inconvenience’ is a masterly understatement. Accordingly in the tenth year of the reign (1565–6) a new practice of applying local prices instead of a single empire price came into force, though the uniform standard yield was still used in estimating the quantity of the produce.

This also proved unworkable, and in the fifteenth year of the reign a new system was introduced under which average yields as well as average prices were determined for each locality on the strength of reports submitted by the qanungoes. In each case the emperor’s orders were required—and the emperor might be at war in the uttermost parts of the empire. Small wonder that according to the Ain-i-Akbari ‘much inconvenience was caused by the delay. On the one hand, the husbandman complained of extensive exactions and on the other, the holder of assigned lands was aggrieved on account of the revenue balances’. In other words, nobody knew where he stood perhaps until after the collecting season was past. In the twenty-fourth year of his reign His Majesty therefore ‘in the discernment of his world-adorning mind fixed a settlement for ten years’, which seems to have been based on figures which had been collected during the fifteenth to twenty-fourth years of the reign.

The demand now ceased to be expressed in terms of grain and became a cash demand per unit area cultivated, fixed for each locality on consideration of average yield and average price. Provision was made for remission, either on account of crop failures, or, more commonly, when good harvests resulted in exceptionally low prices. The system still involved an annual measurement of the area cultivated, though a little later it began to be the practice merely to note alterations in area since the previous year. At the time of measurement allowance was made for any crop failure already apparent, but it is not clear what procedure was followed for dealing with failures after measurement.

This settlement seems to have worked well and continued throughout Akbar’s reign. Thereafter the administration lost some of its vigour, and annual measurement over the vast area affected became too difficult and provided too many opportunities for the corruption which never ceased to be a grave menace in this epoch. Gradually Akbar’s system of direct settlement with the cultivator (except, of course, in the assigned areas) was replaced by the practice of annual settlements with the village headman, who was then left to distribute the demand amongst the villagers as local custom and the headman’s own predilections might direct. These annual village settlements had become normal by the time of Aurangzib, though the alternative of measurement was theoretically available if a village felt itself aggrieved by the settlement proposed to it.

It now remains to consider who was to receive the revenue from the cultivator. During the Hindu period the difficulty of direct collection of revenue over a large area, together with the necessity of remunerating state officers in some convenient way, had led to the growth of the practice of assignment. Particular areas of territory were assigned to important individuals who were not only authorised to collect and appropriate the revenue therefrom but also to exercise many of the functions of the king and to maintain law and order in their assignments.

The Muslim conquests encouraged the growth of this system, not only because of the administrative difficulties experienced by the newcomers, but also because of the position of the many Hindu chiefs who still retained their territories under the suzerainty of the kings of Delhi. The greater chiefs in some cases remained practically independent, subject only to payment of a cash tribute, but many of the lesser rulers became, for all practical purposes, assignees. One portion of the state of each such chief was regarded as his assignment in the technical sense, while he was supposed to collect the revenue from the remainder and forward it to the king. Like other assignees, he continued to maintain law and order and generally to exercise authority in his state.

Ala-ud-din, a strong and able administrator who occupied the Delhi throne early in the fourteenth century, disliked the system of assignment on the ground that it tended to build up a body of local grandees who might be potential rebels. He accordingly resumed assignments and reverted to direct relations with the cultivators wherever possible, but the strain on the administrative system proved too great, and under his successors the practice of assignment was revived. The contrast between the attitude of Ala-ud-din and that of his successors in this matter is made clear in their revenue regulations. Whereas Ala-ud-din laid down that ‘there was to be one rule for the payment of tribute, applicable to all, from chief to sweeper’, his successor, Tughlak Shah, took a very different view of the position of the chiefs. ‘It cannot be denied,’ he declared, ‘that abundant responsibilities rest on the neck of chiefs and headmen, so that if they too contribute a share in the same way as the peasants, the advantage of being a chief or headman would disappear.’

The contrast is all the more interesting in view of the agreement of the two rulers as to the treatment of the Hindus in general. According to Ala-ud-din, ‘the Hindu was to be so reduced as to be left unable to keep a horse to ride on, to carry arms, to wear fine clothes, or to enjoy the luxuries of life’. Tughlak Shah also laid it down that ‘the Hindus were to be taxed so that they might not be blinded with wealth and so become discontented and rebellious’, though he wisely added the qualification that they should not be ‘so reduced to poverty and destitution as to be unable to pursue their husbandry’.

Ala-ud-din’s view was not generally accepted by the kings of Delhi, and the practice of assignment grew steadily. Under the Lodi kings, shortly before the Mughal conquest, the revenue held under assignment was perhaps greater than that under direct collection. In the meantime the powers and obligations of the assignees had alike increased and there was already a tendency towards that association of assignment with the maintenance of a body of troops which was to be a main characteristic of the Mughal period.

Under the Mughal Empire the practice of assignment became still more regular. It was, however, attended with one serious practical difficulty. When the emperor directed that an assignment of a particular cash value should be made to one of his officers of state, the revenue authorities had to select an area or areas which would yield this sum. The opportunities for corruption were endless, and the contemporary chronicles abound with examples of how well those opportunities were used. On the other hand, conscientious revenue officials were often tempted to overvalue assignments in the interests of the state. Even when the original valuation was correct, it might rapidly fall out of date with changing agricultural conditions, and the making of the necessary adjustments would demand higher standards of efficiency and integrity than in fact existed. Only the assignee with a long purse or with powerful friends at court could rely on a fair deal.

The Emperor Akbar was fully conscious of these facts, and in 1574 he embarked on a policy of resuming most assignments and paying cash salaries to his officials. As in the time of Ala-ud-din, however, the administrative difficulties seem to have proved too great, and a few years later assignments again became usual. By the time of Shahjahan the revenue of the assigned areas amounted to nineteen crores⁵ of rupees, while that of the reserved areas, that is, areas under direct collection, was only three crores.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century a reverse tendency set in, chiefly because unstable political conditions and the decline of agriculture had made assignments less profitable and so less popular, but in general terms it may be said that the Mughals preferred assignment to direct collection.

Two other aspects of the system call for comment. In the first place, it became the normal method of paying the mansabdars, whose functions and position have already been described, and assignments thus became definitely associated with military liabilities. Secondly, the tenure of the assignees was extremely uncertain. Assignments changed hands very frequently, with the natural result that their holders were more bent on squeezing as much as possible out of the cultivators than on attending to the long-term prosperity of their territories.

Assignees were not the only intermediaries between the king and the cultivator. Grantees and revenue farmers both played an important part. Whereas an assignment was made in consideration of a current service, a grant was generally made either as a reward for past services, or just as a gift, or, as the Ain-i-Akbari tells us, as a result of His Majesty’s ‘desire to promote distinctions of rank’. Although the king had the right to resume grants whenever he chose—and Akbar exercised that right freely, as Ala-ud-din had done nearly three centuries earlier—they tended on the whole to be more permanent than assignments. They were controlled by a separate department of state under officials known as provincial sadrs, and that department acquired an unsavoury reputation in the matter of bribe-taking. Abul Fazl records that ‘on account of the general peace and security in the empire, the grant-holders commenced to lay out their lands in gardens, and thereby derived so much profit, that it tempted the greediness of the Government officers, who had certain notions of how much was sufficient for Grantees, to demand revenue taxes; but this displeased His Majesty, who commanded that such profits should not be interfered with’. Akbar’s efforts to prevent injustice availed little against the cunning of the officials. Farmans, specifying the land of grantees, were often drawn up with deliberate inaccuracy or ambiguity, so that the grantees were at the mercy of the sadr or qazi and could ensure security of tenure only by bribery. sadr after qazi was dismissed by Akbar without any apparent improvement in the standards of integrity, but the power of the sadrs was eventually broken and the grantees probably gained some relief for a time.

The system of revenue-farming, well known in Hindu times, was much favoured by the Mughals. The governor of a province would contract to make an annual payment which was calculated to be the difference between estimated revenue receipts and probable expenditure on state purposes. The advantages of such an arrangement from the point of view of the central revenue authorities were obvious, particularly when it was combined with the Draconian methods of flogging and torture which the Muslim rulers of India, with certain exceptions, freely applied to defaulting officers. It simplified the problem of accounting, though there were times when the emperors sought to protect cultivators against excessive exactions by governors and therefore insisted on meticulous accounting even though the revenue had been farmed. At an early but uncertain date in the Muslim period this system was extended far beyond its original scope. The revenue of a particular area would be put up to auction and numerous speculators were always prepared to bid for the chance of extorting from the peasantry sums larger than those prescribed by regulation or custom. The system inevitably led to wholesale oppression, which has been graphically described by Bernier. ‘The persons thus put in possession of the land, whether as timariots, governors, or contractors, have an authority almost absolute over the peasantry, and nearly as much over the artisans and merchants of the towns and villages within their district; and nothing can be imagined more cruel and oppressive than the manner in which it is exercised. There is no one before whom the injured peasant, artisan, or tradesman can pour out his just complaints; no great lords, parliaments, or judges of local courts, exist, as in France, to restrain the wickedness of those merciless oppressors, and the Kadis, or judges, are not invested with sufficient power to redress the wrongs of these unhappy people. This sad abuse of the royal authority may not be felt in the same degree near capital cities such as Dehly and Agra, or in the vicinity of large towns and seaports, because in those places acts of gross injustice cannot easily be concealed from the court.’

In theory, the same principles of assessment and demand which were in operation in the reserved areas applied in the areas under assignment, and this was probably true in practice, too, in the time of the Emperor Akbar. As administration declined, the assignees became more a law unto themselves, and by the time of Aurangzib they enjoyed a great measure of freedom, though the provincial diwan still exercised a not very clearly defined kind of supervision.

It now remains to consider the machinery of revenue collection in the reserved areas while Akbar’s Regulation System was in full vigour. Little is known about the corresponding machinery before Akbar decided to resume assignments wherever possible and to undertake direct collection throughout most of the empire. That experiment, as we have seen, soon broke down, but in the meantime it had produced a clearly defined revenue-collecting agency.

In 1573 the country was divided into collecting districts, each so demarcated that it might be expected to yield a revenue of about one crore of dams or 250,000 rupees and each under the charge of an officer styled amalguzar or superintendent, popularly known as the krori. He was responsible, through a chain of intermediaries, of whom the provincial diwan was one, to the Imperial Revenue Ministry. It seems to have been Akbar’s profound dissatisfaction with the oppression resulting from the abuse of assignments that led him to establish this system, but the need for developing waste land and so increasing revenue was a subsidiary motive. Badauni, an orthodox contemporary historian, much prejudiced against Akbar, records: ‘In this year an order was promulgated for improving the cultivation of the country and for bettering the condition of the raiyats. All the pargannas of the country, whether dry or irrigated, whether in towns or hills, in deserts and jungles, by rivers, reservoirs, or wells, were all to be measured and every such piece of land as, upon cultivation, would produce one kror of tankas, was to be divided off, and placed under the charge of an officer to be called a krori, who was to be selected for his trustworthiness, whether known or unknown to the revenue clerks and treasurers, so that in the course of three years all the uncultivated land might be brought into cultivation and the public treasury might be replenished. Security was taken from each one of these officers.’

The krori’s duties were almost as multifarious as those of a modern magistrate and collector and are set forth in some detail in the fifth Ain of the third book. He ‘should be a friend of the agriculturist. Zeal and truthfulness should be his rule of conduct. He should consider himself the representative of the lord paramount and establish himself where every one may have easy access to him without the intervention of a mediator. . . . He should not cease from punishing highway robbers, murderers and evildoers, nor from heavily mulcting them, and so administer that the cry of complaint shall be stilled. He should assist the needy husbandman with advances of money and recover them gradually. . . . He should strive to bring waste lands into cultivation and take heed that what is in cultivation fall not waste. He should stimulate the increase of valuable produce and remit somewhat of the assessment with a view to its augmentation’. His dealings were to be, not with the headman, but with individual peasants. ‘He should always seek to satisfy the owner of the crops. He should not entrust the appraisement to the headman of the village lest it give rise to remissness and undue authority be conferred on high-handed oppressors.’

On top of all this, he was to keep the accounts, recommend remission in case of disaster to the crops, assign the village cattle to individuals and prepare every month what seems to have been the precursor of a modern administration report. ‘Every month he shall submit a statement of the condition of the people, of the jagirdars, the neighbouring residents, the submission of the rebellious, the market prices, the current rents of tenements, the state of the destitute poor, of artificers, and all other contingencies.’ In addition to all these duties, ‘should there be no kolwal the Collector must take the duties of that office upon himself’.

We know nothing as to the size of the krori’s staff, though the duties of his clerk are laid down in detail in the Ain, but it must have been large, for, as Moreland points out, he must have had to deal with about 250,000 bighas of cropped land—rather more than 240 square miles. Although the krori was not to make settlement with the village headmen, he had necessarily to work largely through the village officers, of whom the headman and the patwari were the most important. Their importance, indeed, grew with the decline in the administrative efficiency of the Government, until at a later date the headman was to become, in effect, the contractor for the revenue of the village. In Akbar’s time the headmen were still coadjutors with the revenue authorities, with traditional rights and powers of their own.

This elaborate revenue machinery could only be controlled properly by a more highly developed central administration than existed in the early part of Akbar’s reign. In the absence of such control, the new collectors soon began to oppress their tenants and at the same time to defraud the Government. Badauni tells us that ‘officers were appointed but eventually they did not carry out the regulations as they ought to have done. A great portion of the country was laid waste through the rapacity of the kroris, the wives and children of the raiyats were sold and scattered abroad and everything was thrown into confusion’. If this testimony were uncorroborated it might be suspect in view of Badauni’s known bias, but it receives full confirmation from Abul Fazl, and, more important still, we have in the Akbarnamah a detailed account of some of the malpractices, written by Todar Mal, who was himself to take in hand their reform. Excessive demands, fraudulent accounting entries, defalcations, false measurements—all are mercilessly catalogued.

Raja Todar Mal, a man equally distinguished as a soldier and as a civil administrator, had been nominally in sole or joint charge of the Revenue Ministry since 1573, but for some years he was mainly absent on military duties. In 1582 he took effective charge of the Ministry and at once set himself to eradicate the gross abuses which had grown up. The thoroughness and severity of his nature led him to extreme measures, graphically described by Badauni: ‘But the kroris were brought to account by Raja Todar Mal and many good men died from the severe beatings which were administered and from the tortures of the rack and the pincers. So many died from protracted confinement in the prisons of the revenue authorities, that there was no need of the executioner or swordsman and no one cared to find them graves or grave-clothes. Their condition was like that of the devout Hindus in the country of Kamrup, who having dedicated themselves to their idol, live for one year in the height of luxury, enjoying everything that comes to their hands; but at the end of the period, one by one they go and assemble at the idol temple, and cast themselves under the wheels of its car, or offer up their heads to the idol.’

In more prosaic terms, Todar Mal revived the old audit procedure, under which officials were from time to time required to produce their accounts for detailed scrutiny and were then compelled by torture to disgorge any balances for which they had not accounted. Todar Mal’s severity earned the emperor’s disapproval, and he was superseded by an imperial commissioner, who introduced a more regular system of audit, fair alike to the revenue and the collector.

One other important development in the revenue administration in Akbar’s reign was the establishment of closer central control. After a short period of experimenting with the appointment of what might be called regional revenue controllers, in 1596 the position and chain of responsibility of the provincial diwans was radically changed. They ceased to be the lieutenants of the provincial subadars and became directly responsible to the Central Revenue Ministry for all land revenue affairs—at any rate in the reserved areas. In modern parlance, it might be said that the executive authority of the centre in land revenue matters was henceforth exercised in the provinces by central officers stationed therein.

The system which we have described lasted in its entirety for a short time only. Throughout the seventeenth century the power of the assignee and the practice of revenue-farming grew apace, and by the eighteenth century most of the land of the empire was under assignees, grantees or revenue farmers, most of whom made their settlements not with the individual cultivators but with the village headmen. In some areas the machinery established by Akbar continued to be used by the assignees and others, but great variations occurred and the revenue system inherited by the British was very unlike that designed by the administrative genius of the great emperor.

Chapter XV

British Administration — The Dual Authority

When future generations appraise British rule in India they may well be uncertain whether to give Britain greater credit for her voluntary abdication of power in 1947, or for her success, in the nineteenth century, in building up an administration which was acknowledged, even by its enemies, to be strong, efficient, just and incorruptible. The transfer of power, and the long-continued policy leading up to it, will be discussed at some length in later sections of this book. In the present section our object is to examine the development of the administration from the early days of the Company, and then to study it as it was in the second half of the nineteenth century, before political changes had begun to affect it and when British power was at its zenith.

The most important feature of British administration in the days of the East India Company was its dual origin. The authority of the Company was derived partly from the Crown and partly by delegation from the Mughal emperor or other rulers. A small body of Englishmen trading in the East had at first no need of an administration beyond that concerned with buying and selling or with the governance of its own members. This limited jurisdiction was granted to the Company by its charters. It was an accepted principle of law in the early seventeenth century that the Crown was entitled to control the actions of Englishmen overseas, and even apart from legal theory it was clearly necessary that the East India Company’s servants in the East should have some bond of authority. The early charters of the Company therefore gave it authority to make ‘reasonable laws, constitutions, orders and ordinances’ and, within limits, to punish offences committed by its servants, but unlike the charters of the companies trading to the Western World, they gave it no territorial, as opposed to personal, jurisdiction. Its powers were very limited, but it was found necessary to give to the ‘general’ in command of each voyage the right of capital punishment. The earliest-known record of any judicial proceedings under this power relates to the year 1616, when Gregory Lellington, having ‘in or near the town of Surat in the dominion of the Mogul, killed Henry Barton, Englishman, and belonging to the company of the good ship The James, then riding in or near the road to Swally’ was condemned ‘that he should, the next day, be conveyed ashore and by the musketeers of the guard be shot to death—and so the Lord have mercy upon his soul’. In 1623 this power of inflicting capital punishment was extended to the Company’s principal officers in India.

For the redress of grievances against natives the British in India were necessarily dependent upon the courts of the local ruler. Much importance was attached to promises of speedy justice in such cases, and in the treaty under which the factory at Surat was established, it was specifically laid down that ‘in all questions, wrongs and injuries that shall be offered to us and our nation, we do receive from the judge and those that be in authority, speedy justice according to the quality of our complaints and wrongs done to us and that by delays we be not put off or worried by time or charge’. Indian justice was never popular with Englishmen in the early days, and wherever the law could be stretched so as to bring the case under the Company’s courts this was done; but in the main, matters affecting the relations between Indians and Europeans had to go to the courts of the local rulers.

With the passage of the years the Company began to feel a need for a surer footing than this limited and purely personal jurisdiction, but, as Berriedale Keith points out, they had little success in acquiring territorial sovereignty in those areas where the power of the Mughal emperor or even of lesser Muslim rulers was effective. It was easier for them to make headway in the territories of small Hindu rajas, and in 1639 the Company acquired Madras and a few adjacent villages by a grant from a local ruler. The King of Golkonda, who drove out that ruler, not only confirmed the grant but extended it to give the Company ‘unrestricted powers of command, government and justice’ subject only to the payment of a ‘quit rent’. This was confirmed in due course by the emperor after he had conquered Golkonda. This was not a temporary delegation of authority but a complete surrender of the full powers of government over these new villages.

The next extension of the Company’s jurisdiction came from home. In 1661 Charles II, who was more favourably disposed to the Company than the first two Stuarts had been, authorised the Company to raise troops, to commission officers, to make war and peace (except against Christian nations) and empowered the Governor and Council of each factory to exercise criminal and civil jurisdiction, not only over the Company’s servants but over ‘all persons belonging to the said Governor or Company or that shall live under them’.

At this stage a further stimulus was given to the growth of the Company’s power by events in Bombay, which Portugal had ceded to the British Crown in 1661. In 1668 Charles II transferred that island to the Company and conferred on them in respect of it what can be described as almost the full powers of government. This was supplemented in 1676 by a specific authorisation to coin money. By the charters of 1683 and 1686 this latter right was conferred generally on the Company everywhere within its sphere of operation, while the previous right of declaring war and peace, and of raising troops, was reaffirmed. At the same time a mercantile and maritime Court was established to deal with matters affecting the company’s charter.

For the next phase of development it is necessary to turn to Bengal, where the East India Company developed on lines very different from those followed in Bombay and Madras. Till the end of the seventeenth century it possessed none of the elements of territorial sovereignty and exercised no jurisdiction except that conferred on it by the Crown over its own servants and those ‘who lived under them’. The great expansion of its jurisdiction in the following hundred years was achieved by three different processes, namely, acquisition of zemindari rights, conquest or cession of territory and assumption of the diwani.

In 1698 the Company bought the zemindari rights of the three villages of Sutanati, Calcutta and Govindpur, which were in due course to grow into the town of Calcutta. The zemindar was responsible not only for collecting the revenue on behalf of the nawab but also for exercising civil and criminal jurisdiction. The nawab and his local authorities were supposed to supervise these judicial functions, but in the case of the East India Company the supervision does not seem to have amounted to much. The Crown had no connection with the Company’s zemindari jurisdiction, and naturally the King’s Courts did not operate therein. In 1717, after the mission of John Surman to the Emperor Farrukh-sujar on behalf of the Company, permission was given to the Company to acquire the zemindari rights in other Bengal villages if it so wished, but it was not until after the Battle of Plassey that advantage was taken of this permission. In 1757 the Company acquired such rights in the district known as the Twenty-Four Parganas, on the basis of a payment of a quit rent to the nawab. The position here, however, was very different from that in Madras, where the Company had obtained the full powers of Government—in the Twenty-four Parganas its rights were strictly limited to those of a zemindar. The quit rent was subsequently assigned by the nawab to Clive, whose heirs had to transfer it to the Company with effect from 1785. Thereafter the Company as zemindar presumably paid the quit rent to itself as holder of the assignment, but by this time the Company had become virtually supreme in Bengal and its theoretical rights as zemindar were of little importance.

In 1760 the Company discovered yet another process of expansion. When Mir Kasim was made nawab he ceded to the Company the districts of Burdwan, Chittagong and Midnapur. The legal validity of such a cession by a usurping viceroy is open to question, but it was confirmed by the emperor in 1765. The constitutional question as to the relation of the British Crown to territories obtained by grant from the emperor was somewhat obscure, but the official view in London was stated as follows: ‘In respect to such places as have been or shall be acquired by treaty or grant from the Moghul or any of the Indian Princes or Governments, Your Majesty’s letters patent are not necessary, the property of the soil vesting in the Company by the Indian grants, subject only to Your Majesty’s right of sovereignty over the settlements . . . and over the inhabitants as English subjects who carry with them Your Majesty’s laws wherever they form colonies. . . . In respect to such places as have lately been acquired or shall hereafter be acquired by conquest, the property and sovereignty vests in Your Majesty’s by virtue of your known prerogative and consequently the Company can only derive a right to them by Your Majesty’s grant.’ By 1765 this was interpreted as meaning that the sovereignty of the British Crown was established in Calcutta, the Twenty-Four Parganas, and the ceded districts. Elsewhere in Bengal, as Dodwell points out, British jurisdiction had a twofold origin and nature. ‘Over Englishmen, the Company relied upon its chartered powers; over Indians, and especially over Moslems in whom alone the local government took any great interest, the authority was that of a minor zemindar under the local fauzdar.’

After the Battle of Buxar in 1764 the British were in fact masters of Bengal. Open annexation would have created difficulties both for the Home Government and for the Company, and recourse was had to two expedients which continued the fiction of the paramountcy of the emperor. In January 1765 Najm-ud-daula was recognised by the Company as nawab on condition that he left the business of government to the Company’s nominees as deputy nawabs, while on 12th August 1765, after protracted negotiations with the emperor and the Nawab of Oudh, the Company was appointed Diwan of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. In the time of Akbar, as we have seen earlier, the offices of Nawab and Diwan were divided in order to strengthen imperial control, but after the death of Aurangzib, Murshid Quli Khan had succeeded in combining them in his own person. Now they were again divided, but the division was nominal rather than real, and all power in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was henceforth concentrated in the East India Company.

For a few years the Company hesitated to exercise its new powers as Diwan, and administration remained in the hands of the nawab’s deputies. The system was unsatisfactory, but was perhaps necessary as a stop-gap while the Company’s servants acquired sufficient knowledge of the country and its administration. It came to an end in 1772, when the Company decided to ‘stand forth as Diwan’, and thus took over the revenue administration of the country.

We must now turn back to affairs in Madras. The grant obtained by the Company in 1639 applied only to Madras itself and a few adjacent villages and for many years the surrounding country continued to be ruled by the nawab on behalf of the emperor.

In 1780, by which time the authority of the emperor had completely disappeared, the nawab assigned the revenues of the province to the Company (or, to be more accurate, to the Governor of Madras with the approval of the Company) for five years. The assignment was mainly a sham, and the nawab took immediate steps to secure the revenues secretly for himself. The Company therefore appointed revenue farmers, who managed affairs so successfully that, while the sums levied from the cultivators were reduced, the amount accruing to the authorities increased. This was the first incursion of the Company into the field of general administration in the Carnatic. Five years later, after an unseemly struggle between the Madras and Bengal Governments, the assignment was annulled by the Company.

The maladministration of the nawab was notorious, but this might have escaped notice had he not been hopelessly in debt to servants of the Company. The settlements of the nawab’s debts took up a considerable part of the time and energies of Madras administrators at this period. One such settlement led to treaties in 1787 and 1792 by which the Company was to control the Carnatic in time of war. Certain districts were also pledged as security for the payment of the nawab’s debts, while Madura and Tinnevelly districts were definitely transferred to the Company. In 1801 matters were brought to their logical conclusion, and, as we have seen earlier, ‘the whole of the civil and military government of the Carnatic was transferred for ever to the company’.

The importance of these transactions, from our present point of view, lies in the fact that in the Madras presidency there was no question of that dual origin of authority to which we have referred earlier. Except during the brief period of revenue-farming from 1780 to 1785, wherever the Company ruled it did so in its own right and not on any pretence of acting for the nawab, who had transferred his authority to the company permanently and irrevocably.

The Company’s jurisdiction had thus grown up in three different ways. In Madras English law was administered as part of the full powers of government conferred permanently and irrevocably on the Company by the local ruler. In Bengal the company held zemindari courts in the districts, and Company’s Courts under royal charter were held in Calcutta and certain other areas; while in Bombay, Company’s Courts under royal charter dealt with all classes of cases.

Jurisdiction having been acquired, courts had to be established and laws enacted. In Bombay and Madras, where the Company’s power was derived from a single source, this was comparatively simple. In Bombay the Company for a time continued the Portuguese law previously in force, but grafted on to it for the government of the garrison martial-law regulations which were justified by the imminence of attack from several quarters, but which were of doubtful legality. After a period of improvisation, the Company enacted laws for Bombay. Their most notable provisions related to religious toleration, trial by jury, and the establishment of a court of judicature. This court of judicature was duly established in 1672. In both civil and criminal cases there was a right of appeal to the Governor and Council, though in civil cases it soon became obsolete. Capital sentences were often referred to the President at Surat. One may note in passing a curious anomaly. In the hierarchy of the Company the President and Council at Surat were the official superiors of the Governor and Council in Bombay—yet the British Crown possessed sovereignty in Bombay, whereas in Surat the Company traded only by permission of the Mughal emperor.

Keigwin’s rebellion and the subsequent quarrels and confusions seem to have brought the court of judicature to a standstill about 1690. In 1718 it was revised on a rather different basis; the jury system was not reintroduced; appeals lay to the Governor and Council, and the judges included a Hindu, a Muhammadan, a Parsi and a Portuguese, as well as a number of the Company’s servants. In 1726 a Mayor’s Court was established for civil cases, while criminal cases were dealt with by the Governor and five members of Council, by whom also appeals from the Mayor’s Courts were heard. Thereafter little serious change took place until the end of the century, but the Company soon had to consider what law was to be administered in dealing with disputes amongst Indians.

In Bengal the problem was far more complicated in view of the dual nature of the Company’s authority. As Diwan, the Company was to some extent responsible for civil justice; while the nawab was in theory responsible for law and order. The nawab’s courts were, however, hopelessly corrupt, and Verelst, the Acting Governor after the departure of Clive, was not exaggerating when he wrote of those courts that ‘every decision is a corrupt bargain with the highest bidder. Trifling offenders are frequently loaded with heavy demands and capital offenders are as often absolved by the venal judge’. Even apart from their corruption, the existing courts were quite inadequate for the satisfactory administration of justice. Before the grant of the Diwani, the Company’s zemindari rights were not very extensive, and it was possible for the Company’s judicial authority as zemindar to be exercised by a member of Council who held what was called a Court of Cutcherry. In civil cases there was an appeal to the President of Council; in criminal cases, according to the accepted law of the Mughal Empire, death sentences passed by a zemindari court required confirmation by the fauzdar. The Company, however, managed to rid themselves of this restriction, and confirmation of such sentences was given by the President.

Conflict soon arose between the Court of Cutcherry and the Mayor’s Court in Calcutta, and in 1758, to resolve this conflict, the Company established a new criminal court which acted as a zemindari court in cases involving Indians and as a Court of Sessions where Europeans were concerned. For unimportant cases one member of the Council alone held the court, but in important matters an appeal lay to a bench of three Members of Council.

After the assumption of the Diwani considerable expansion of these courts was required, and Hastings established District Civil and Criminal Zemindari Courts each under an officer of the Company, who was assisted by the qazi, the mufti and other learned exponents of the Muhammadan law. In criminal matters, Muhammadan law alone seems to have been followed, but in civil cases regard was apparently paid to the personal law of the parties. In civil suits appeals lay to the Sadr Diwani Adalat, which in effect meant the President and certain members of Council, together with certain Indian officers. Criminal appeals, on the other hand, lay to the Sadr Nizamat Adalat, which was under the control of the nawab and in which the chief kazi and the chief mufti sat to advise the Muslim judge.

One particular difficulty arose at this time from the fact that there were large numbers of Englishmen in the Company’s service resident outside Calcutta. The Mayor’s Court had no authority over them, while on the other hand the zemindari courts of the Company administered a law which could not appropriately be applied to them. In 1773 the Regulating Act dealt with this problem by setting up in Bengal the Supreme Court, which derived its power from the Crown and which exercised jurisdiction over all British subjects resident in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, whether in civil or in criminal matters. Complaints or suits against or between Indians could be heard by the Supreme Court only with the consent of the parties—except in Calcutta and the factories subordinate thereto, in respect of which it exercised jurisdiction over all persons. Keith rightly points out that the Act left many matters vague and undefined. It did not, for example, clarify the position with regard to residents of the ceded districts, who might perhaps be deemed to be covered by its jurisdiction; nor did it lay down ‘the nature of the law to be administered in the court’. Much more important was the fact that it continued the dualism, which was perhaps unavoidable as long as it was deemed necessary to keep up the fiction that the Company derived some part of its authority from the Mughal emperor.

There were now two rival sets of principal judicial authorities: on the one hand the Supreme Court, and on the other the Sadr Diwani Adalat, which was in effect the President and Council. This was bound to lead to conflict, and a number of test cases soon arose. In one case the Supreme Court took the exaggerated view that a zemindar was in a sense a Company servant, and thus subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in civil matters; in another, the Supreme Court claimed jurisdiction over officers of the Company in regard to misdeeds committed by them in their official capacity. A temporary solution was sought in 1780 by appointing the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as President of the Sadr Diwani Adalat, but this was clearly objectionable in principle. In one sense the conflict was extremely important, for the real issue was not merely as to whether the local officers could be tried by the Supreme Court, but rather whether the Governor-General and Council and those acting under their orders could be brought to book by the courts or not. The Governor-General and Council were in fact claiming what might be called droit administratif.

For the time being the Governor-General and Council won their case, for an Act passed in 1781 excluded the Governor-General and Council (and subordinates acting under their orders) from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and further debarred the Supreme Court from exercising any jurisdiction in revenue matters. It also put an end to the claim of the Supreme Court to have jurisdiction over zemindars. On the other hand, it made it clear that the entire population of Calcutta was subject to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, though the personal law of Hindus and Muhammadans was to be applied to them. The position of the Governor-General and Council as an appellate court from the zemindari civil courts was maintained. Criminal appeals still lay to the Deputy Diwan (Muhammad Reza Khan) until 1790, when they were transferred to the Governor-General and Council, who were to be assisted by the Chief Kazi and two muftis. This change indeed was part of the general policy of Cornwallis of replacing Indians by Europeans in all superior posts. Local courts which had been presided over by Indians were now converted into circuit courts under officers of the Company, to whom kazis and muftis were attached in an advisory capacity.

Throughout this period there were constant changes in the arrangements for the discharge of revenue, magisterial and judicial functions in the districts, and the positions of collectors, magistrates and judges underwent many changes. In 1790 the Cornwallis policy led to the establishment of District Courts under British judges, from whom appeals lay to four new appellate courts set up at Calcutta, Dacca, Murshidabad and Patna. European British subjects were still not theoretically under the jurisdiction of the District Courts, which were, in origin, zemindari courts. Such persons, however, required a licence to live in Bengal outside Calcutta, and from the time of Cornwallis they were only given such licences provided they contracted into the jurisdiction of the District Courts.

In 1801 the judicial authority of the Governor-General and Council came to an end, for three judges were appointed to form the Sadr Diwani Adalat or civil appellate court. The changes made in the next sixty years were of detail rather than principle, and in our study of the impact of Britain on India in the judicial sphere we need not be concerned with them. Throughout that period the principle of duality between the courts of the Crown and what were essentially the zemindari courts of the Company continued until in 1861 the Indian High Court Act established High Courts at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay to take the place of the former Supreme Court as well as of the Sadr courts. This step had become both possible and necessary because the East India Company had disappeared, and all its powers, from whatever source they might have been derived, were now exercised by the Crown. Dualism was at an end, and a period of unqualified and unashamed British bureaucracy was about to begin.

One important result of this duality was that the Company administered two or perhaps three different sets of law. At an early stage the Company had had to consider what law was to be administered in dealing with disputes amongst Indians, and Keith tells us that in 1731 the Company ‘insisted that disputes between natives should be decided amongst themselves according to their own customs or by justices or referees to be appointed by themselves or otherwise as they thought fit. If, however, they desired the court to decide it must do so by English law, and the same rule must apply in differences between natives and subjects of England when either party was obstinate or determined to go to law’. This position, however, could clearly not be maintained in those areas where the Company exercised jurisdiction as zemindar. While, therefore, in regard to Englishmen generally the Company’s courts administered English law, in the zemindari districts it administered to the Hindus and Muslims their own laws with some modifications. This principle was indeed followed as regards civil courts even in Calcutta in the Act of 1781.

The effects of this dualism were far-reaching. If the English in the first flush of their eastern power had ruled solely on behalf of the British Crown, the temptation to sweep Hindu and Muhammadan law and procedure arrogantly aside might have been very great. As it was, in the early formative years after Plassey lip service at least had to be paid to the fact that an important element of power was derived from the emperor. This was a useful brake; it gave time for the reflection that in governing the people of India more regard would have to be paid to their sentiments and beliefs than to purely English theories. At a later stage, when all legal fictions had been swept away, and Britain ruled India frankly in its own right, this reflection gave rise to much controversy as to whether India should be governed on European or on Oriental principles, and from that controversy, in due course, sprang the modern political development of India.

The Crown and the Company between them ultimately produced a uniform judicial system based mainly on English legal principles but paying due regard to Hindu and Muhammadan law and customs. It brought into the administration of India certain elements which were not present before the British period, and those elements were strengthened by the codification of civil and criminal law which was undertaken in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the main new features introduced were four in number.

The first of the four was the ‘rule of law’—the end of the arbitrary authority claimed by all the earlier rulers of India. Henceforth a man might know his rights and assert them against the world. There was a time in the history of the East India Company when it was by no means clear that matters would develop in this way. The Company, indeed, at one time claimed that its acts and those of its officers should be outside the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and so, in practice, not open to question at all. For a time this claim succeeded, but as the influence of the British Parliament on Indian affairs grew such a principle was untenable and in the end the idea of a droit administratif was rejected. Under British rule this principle of the ‘rule of law’ entered so deeply into the minds and hearts of educated Indians that the occasional departures from it, under public security regulations in times of emergency, provoked quite genuine outbursts of indignation and horror. Indians, whose ancestors would have accepted arbitrary execution by earlier despots as part of the natural order of things, denounced internment and externment orders against terrorists in the twentieth century as gross tyranny and thus paid unconscious tribute to the success of the British in introducing a new concept of human rights.

The second new concept was that of equality before the law. Actual equality of this kind has perhaps never yet been achieved in any country or at any time. Money, education and position do still, within limits, count with the courts in England and elsewhere. It is, however, at least true to say that in India as in England equality before the law is today accepted as the ideal and some approximation to it results. No such concept would have been acceptable as between a Brahman and an outcaste in the Hindu period, or as between Hindus and Muslims under the Mughals. The penalties for crimes such as murder and the value to be attached to a man’s evidence, all varied with his class and status. In this matter modern India has become fully converted to the doctrine of equal legal rights for all, and this must clearly be attributed to the influence of the British judicial system.

The third important characteristic of Anglo-Indian law is its firm recognition of the right of every man to be judged, in a wide range of civil matters, by his own personal law—whether he be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Parsi or a Christian. No such principle was recognised in Mughal times, and indeed there were long periods in which regard was not paid to Hindu law at all. This new recognition of the personal rights of all communities sprang primarily not from any superior virtue in the English but merely from their position as a small band of foreign rulers, not particularly interested in the differences between Hindu and Muslim, but vitally concerned to keep their subjects content. It was also to some extent linked to the growing idea of toleration and personal liberty.

The fourth and perhaps the most important feature of British judicial administration in India was the growth of a professional and therefore trained judicial hierarchy. In the time of the previous rulers of India, qazis, muftis and other professional experts had been attached to courts as advisers, but decisions had often been in the hands of landholders, assignees and other interested persons or non-judicial officers. The growth of the judicial services, together with the great development of codified law, did much to build up that confidence in the courts which has survived all recent political changes and is still the sheet anchor of Indian liberty.

Chapter XVI

The Growth of Parliamentary Control

After the Battle of Buxar it was clear that the East India Company was to be a great factor in Northern India, but whether this would make for good or ill was for a time uncertain. Much depended on the outcome of the contest for the control of the Company’s affairs, which was imminent. Was India to be governed by a trading corporation which would naturally look primarily to dividends, or was the real authority to be exercised by the English Parliament? In the latter case, would Parliament continue to regard India as the happy hunting ground of the younger sons and nephews of the great English families, or would it develop a genuine sense of responsibility for the welfare of India?

At the time when the Company ‘stood forth as Diwan’ both these questions were unanswered. Forty years later, when the Company lost the monopoly of the Indian trade, both had been settled in a manner honourable to England and promising for India. In order to understand how this came about it is necessary to make a brief survey of the development of the Company’s government in India and of its relations to the British Government.

The early organisation of the Company in India was naturally that suitable to a purely trading organisation. Each chief ‘factory’ or trading establishment was under the control of a President (later called Governor) and a Council consisting of the senior servants of the Company in the factory. The President was in very much the same position as the chairman of a board of directors; he took the chair and naturally gave a lead, though he was bound by the views of the Council. As new and less important factories were opened, they were put under the charge of a senior merchant or factor who was subordinate to the President and Council of the parent factory. Surat and Madras were for a time the centres of control, but Bombay superseded Surat on the west coast in 1687, and in 1700 Calcutta was given independent status.

Communal life was an important feature of each chief factory. The President and some of the senior servants of the company might have houses of their own, but there was a common mess, at which all the European servants of the Company, from the highest to the lowest, were expected to dine. Precedence was strictly enforced, and young men had not only to do what they were told but also to pay due deference to their elders. Thus the foundations of a ‘service spirit’ were laid.

The commercial factories which had Presidents of Council came to be called Presidencies, and during most of the eighteenth century the Presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta were independent and of equal standing.

This form of control may have been suitable for commercial transactions, but it was clearly unsatisfactory when the Company had to deal with political matters—notoriously so during the discussions of Vansittart with Mir Kasim over the vexed question of the rights of the Company and its servants to participate, free of duty, in the internal trade. An attempt was made to mitigate the difficulties arising from this system by setting up a kind of shadow cabinet inside the Council. From 1770 onwards the Governor, the Commander-in-Chief and three senior members of Council formed a Select Committee which dealt with what might be called foreign relations. Such an arrangement had, indeed, been made fourteen years earlier to deal with an emergency, but it now became permanent.

The Governor was unable to act without the consent of his colleagues, and administration could therefore be paralysed by a divided Council. The Regulating Act of 1773, which might be regarded as the first serious attempt by Parliament to take hold of Indian affairs, still left the Governor-General of Bengal without any power to enforce his will, and as a result Warren Hastings was thwarted in many important schemes. In theory, the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay were, by this act, made subject to the Governor-General and Council in Bengal in the making of war and peace, but the exceptions laid down to this rule were so wide as to render it nugatory.

In 1781 a step towards greater control by the British Government over the affairs of the Company was taken. It was laid down that all despatches from the Company affecting political and certain other matters were to be submitted to the Secretary of State. In the same year a Secret and a Select Committee were appointed by Parliament and between them they produced eighteen reports on Indian affairs. Never before and rarely since that time has Parliament ever taken such sustained interest in the government of India. During the short period of shameless British corruption in India great fortunes had been acquired, and those who had survived the high mortality of eighteenth-century India returned to England as wealthy ‘nabobs’ to attract great attention and dislike. The vast patronage enjoyed by the directors of the East India Company had created profound jealousy, and Fox—who frankly disliked the Company and all its works and spoke of the Company’s administration as a ‘system of despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world’—introduced a Bill which would have completely undermined the authority of the Company and transferred all effective power to the Home Government. Burke supported Fox, and the two greatest orators of the day vied with each other in intemperate abuse of the Company. Thanks to his unsurpassed command of the English language, Burke’s reputation as a political philosopher has scarcely been impaired by the numerous changes and inconsistencies in his political life. At the time of the Regulating Act he had opposed investigation into the affairs of the Company and had alleged that the reforms then proposed were ‘only made with the single design of fleecing the Company.’ In 1784, however, he denounced the East India Company as ‘one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever existed in the world’.

In 1784 Pitt drafted a sounder and more temperate Bill. Clearly a large measure of authority had to be resumed by the Home Government and a trading corporation could no longer be allowed to handle uncontrolled the affairs of an empire in embryo. On the other hand, there were obvious dangers in transferring undue power of detailed control to the Home Government. English politics at the end of the eighteenth century were far from pure, and patronage played a dangerously large part in public affairs. India offered scope for such patronage on an unlimited scale, and thinking men were profoundly worried lest it should become a major corrupting influence in the English parliamentary system. On this point Pitt and Fox thought alike. Fox stated that placing with the Crown the entire management of our new eastern territories ‘would afford to Government such ample means of corruption and undue influence that it might in the end overthrow the whole constitution. The Company ought, therefore, to be left to appoint its own servants’. Pitt put it still more forcibly when he said: ‘ Let the Hon. Secretary beware while he secures to the Gentoos⁶ their natural right that in doing so he does not destroy the liberties of Britons.’ Pitt therefore aimed at what he described—by comparison with Fox’s rejected measure—as ‘affording a vigorous system of control with less possibility of influence—securing the possession of the east to the public without confiscating the property of the Company’. The Act established a Board of Control, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State, which had no power to appoint or dismiss the Company’s servants, but which had the right to approve or disapprove all the Company’s letters regarding matters not primarily commercial. It effectively transferred to Parliament control over major aspects of Indian policy, while it left patronage in the hands of the Directors.

The Act also extended the control of the Governor-General of Bengal over Bombay and Madras—though such control could not be exercised thoroughly in the imperfect state of communications then prevailing. The Act still left the Governor-General dependent on a majority in his Council, but that defect was remedied by an Act of 1791, which gave the Governor-General the right to overrule his Council. In 1793 the Governor-General was given further control over the other Presidencies. The chain of control of the British Parliament through the Governor-General and Council of Bengal and over the Governor and Council of the other Presidencies was now complete.

The demand for this kind of control had arisen, not primarily from any vision of the boundless possibilities of the future or from the desire for imperial power, but because public opinion in England had been genuinely shocked by the scandals in Bengal and Madras. Burke and Fox had spoken intemperately as was their wont, but they had aroused the conscience of England.

Chapter XVII

The Growth of District Administration

In earlier chapters we have seen that the art of administration was developed to a high level by the greatest of the Mughal emperors and by two or three Hindu rulers during the course of the centuries. It was, however, only within the narrow geographical limits of the Home Province that this art was fully practised, and even there it depended almost entirely on the personal energy of the emperor. As the Mughal power began to decline, the administrative system rapidly broke down and little that was good was left to the East India Company to inherit. Whatever may have been the case in the time of Akbar and Shahjahan, in the eighteenth century practically nothing remained of the district administration except the machinery for collecting revenue. In many areas the zemindar had for some time been nothing more than a tax gatherer, and it was natural that the local officials, who depended on him, should also have forgotten their ancient responsibility for law and order. Even the thanadar, or officer in charge of a police station, was concerned mainly with assisting in the realisation of rent and dealing with absconding cultivators, though from time to time he was also called to account for depredations of government property. The old principle, that a local administrator must catch robbers and dacoits or else make good the damage done by them had become obsolete. The village chowkidar, who had played such an important part in the ancient Hindu village, had in later Muslim times become practically a servant of the landlord. In the judicial field it is no exaggeration to say that particularly in Bengal, justice had disappeared from the land. Robert Orme, a life-long student of Indian affairs, wrote thus in 1763: ‘The value of the bribe ascertains the justice of the cause . . . still the forms of justice subsist; witnesses are heard; but browbeaten and removed; proofs of writing produced; but deemed forgeries, and rejected, until the way is cleared for a decision, which becomes totally or partially favourable, in proportion to the methods which have been used to render it such.’ The old traditions of Muslim imperial rule had broken down and the East India Company had to start from scratch.

The Company’s first experience of district administration was gained, long before it became the virtual ruler of Bengal, in the zemindari of Sutanati, Govindpur and Calcutta, which it acquired in 1698. There the Company became entitled not only to levy transit duties and to collect the rent but also in practice to govern these three villages completely, provided it paid Rs. 1,200 a year to the Mughal emperor. In 1700 an additional member of Council was created by the Company to deal with this particular work and was known as the Collector. The first Collector, with a jurisdiction of 1,861 acres comprising three villages, was Ralph Sheldon. Population grew rapidly and revenue rose with it, but within a few years the subordinate rent-collecting agents were found to be cheating the Company regularly. In order to reduce the temptation to such dishonesty it was decided to employ a more highly paid staff, and so from 1706 the salary of a clerk was raised to 8r. a month. Indian ‘general supervisees’, known by the disrespectful designation of ‘black collectors’, were employed, but they proved to be no more honest than any of the Company’s European servants in the eighteenth century.

The duties of the Collector of the Company’s first zemindari varied from time to time, but for a period he was also magistrate and head of the police force. In 1704 that force consisted of an Indian superintendent, forty-five constables, two beadles and twenty watchmen, but crime grew apace with the increase in population and in 1706 the number of watchmen had to be increased to thirty-one. The small English settlement relied for its protection on a garrison of three officers and about one hundred and fifty men, a considerable proportion of whom were employed in convoying the Company’s ‘investment’ to Patna. More effective support was perhaps given by the large river fleet which transported commodities from the interior to Calcutta. We may note in passing that English seamanship stood the Company in good stead at this time, and before long Mughal inland shipping was so largely dependent on English pilots that the Company was able to disturb the local authorities by threatening to withdraw them. Whatever else the English in India may have lacked at that time, they had boundless self-confidence.

As we have seen earlier, when the Company first became Diwan of Bengal, it was neither able nor willing to undertake the direct collection of revenue, and Muhammad Reza Khan and Raja Shitab Roi, Deputy Diwans for Bengal and Bihar respectively, were left, without any supervision in the first place, to discharge that function. The Company was at this time in grave financial difficulties. It had just been required to pay £400,000 a year for two years to the Home Government for the continuation of its privileges and its debts were about £6,000,000. It therefore put heavy pressure on the Deputy Diwans to pay the maximum possible sum by way of revenue; and as collections through the agency of the established zemindars were unsatisfactory, in many areas new short-term revenue farmers were appointed to extort the uttermost farthing from the cultivators.

The results were disastrous, and in 1769 Richard Becher, a servant of the Company, drew a graphic picture of the contrast between the moderate assessment of a few years earlier and the sum now exacted under nominal British control. Speaking of the earlier period, he said, with perhaps a good deal of exaggeration, ‘This mode of Collection (i.e. under the Moghuls) and a free Trade . . . made this Country flourish even under an arbitrary Government, and at a Time when a large Tract of it was annually invaded by the Mahrattas. . . . When the English received the grant of the Diwani their first consideration seems to have been the raising of as large sums from the Country as could be collected. . . . What a destructive system is this for the poor Inhabitants.’

In judging the Company’s servants at this period, considerable allowance must be made for their complete inexperience and ignorance of revenue matters, and it is perhaps much to their credit that within four years they had realised that things had gone wrong and had indeed begun to look for a remedy.

As a first step, in this direction, in 1769 the Company appointed ‘supravisors’ in the Bengal districts. They were not primarily to be concerned with the collection of revenue, though they were to be consulted in doubtful cases by the local Indian collecting agents, but they were to make a systematic study of the revenue, the economic position, the administration of justice and the local customs, particularly in so far as they affected revenue. History was also to receive their attention; and in the words of the ‘Instructions to the Supravisors’ they were to study ‘the form of the ancient constitution of the province, compared with the present’ and to prepare ‘an account of its possessors or rulers, the order of their succession, the revolutions in their families and their connections; the peculiar customs and privileges which they or their people have established and enjoyed; and in short, every transaction which serves to trace their origin and progress or has produced any material change in the affairs of the province’.

They were, in fact, to lay the foundations of knowledge upon which a satisfactory revenue system could be built. A lofty standard was held up before them in their official instructions: ‘Your Commission entrusts you with the superintendence and charge of a province whose rise and fall must considerably affect the public welfare of the whole. The exposing and eradicating of numberless oppressions which are as grievous to the poor as they are injurious to the Government; the displaying of those national principles of honour, faith, rectitude, and humility which should ever characterise the name of an Englishman; the impressing of the lowest individual with these ideas, and raising the heart of the Ryot from oppression and despondency to security and joy, are the valuable benefits which must result to our nation from a prudent and wise behaviour on your part.’

The ideal was excellent, but it did not work. Local collecting agents were obstructive, the hereditary Qanungos took care not to provide accurate information, and the supervisors themselves were in most cases more concerned with private trade than with carrying out their duties. In this period of British rule the contrasts between theory and practice were very marked.

When the Company decided to ‘stand forth as Diwan’ in 1772 the Supervisors were appointed as Collectors, with Indian diwans to assist them. The Supervisors had begun to acquire a good deal of knowledge and the system promised well. Unfortunately the right to contract for the revenue was again put up to auction and the original zemindars were replaced by the highest bidders. This led to extortionate practices against which the Collectors protested in vain.

Hastings had been much impressed with the absence of any regular judicial machinery in the interior. The Committee of Circuit which he set up to undertake the task of reorganising administration found that the operation of the courts was confined ‘to a Circle, extending but very small Distance from the City of Murshidabad’ (the Mughal capital of Bengal) and that justice was, in fact, beyond the reach of the great majority of the people. To remedy this defect, the Collectors were entrusted with jurisdiction in civil cases and were also directed to exercise some degree of control over the Indian magistrates and police officers. The new system was not given time to prove itself, for in 1773 the Collectors were replaced by Indian diwans and supervision over police and magisterial work was at an end. The change was unfortunate and worked badly in both the executive and revenue spheres. The Provincial Councils, set up as controlling bodies in the divisions, did little to improve matters.

In 1781 the policy was again reversed. Collectors were once more put in charge of districts, but the trend of Hastings’ thoughts was strongly towards centralisation, and at first the Collectors had little power. In pursuance of the same tendency the Provincial Councils were replaced by a Committee of Revenue in Calcutta. Hastings indeed hoped in due course to secure direct payment of all land revenue in Calcutta and to centralise all revenue administration therein. In this aim he was probably influenced by the realisation that the number of the Company’s servants whose ability and integrity could be trusted was still very small, and that centralisation under those few was therefore desirable. Such a degree of centralisation was, however, impracticable, and in spite of Hastings’ theories the power of the Collectors gradually grew. For a decade, in addition to their collecting functions, they were the District Judges, they exercised the powers of magistrates and they actually settled the local revenue.

This trend was stimulated in the early days of Lord Cornwallis’ Governor-Generalship by his determination to have Englishmen in all key posts. The system did not work very well, perhaps because the Collectors’ main attention at this time was given to the collection of revenue. Writing of the district of Birbhum, Sir William Hunter in his fascinating book The Annals of Rural Bengal says that the single judge (who was also the collector) ‘divided his attention among six offices, each of which he deemed more important than his judicial work’. Delays in the administration, of justice were appalling, and Sir William Hunter quotes an official return to the effect that in the same district out of one hundred and twelve suits filed between 1787 and 1792 decrees had been issued in sixty-nine only by the end of 1792. He goes so far as to say that ‘until 1793 civil justice was unknown in Bengal’—and it is difficult to regard this as an exaggeration.

The Company was in fact still experimenting—and still rather grudged the energy and money spent an administration. The next experiment, initiated by Cornwallis in 1793, consisted of complete separation of revenue from judicial and police administration. The Collector, who had for a few years been all-important, was to be concerned only with the collection of revenue, while the District Judge would be the head of the district, with magisterial and police functions.

The essence of the later Cornwallis system (apart from the Permanent Settlement, which will be discussed in the next chapter) was threefold. Revenue administration was to be kept distinct from judicial and police functions, Europeans were to be employed in all-important posts everywhere, and innumerable checks and balances were to be applied by means of an elaborate code. This system was partly a reflection of the remarkable influence of the eighteenth-century French philosophers who believed, to some extent incorrectly, that the English constitution was based on the separation of powers. In the Cornwallis scheme, however, the separation was far from complete, for the District Judge had control of the police—but it was sufficiently complete to be impracticable. The only official at that time who had developed any real contact with the people was the Collector, and he was expressly debarred from dealing with those aspects of Government which affected them most, namely the magistracy and the police. The Cornwallis theory was that an independent judiciary would, by itself, guarantee justice. In reality the judicial machinery was uncomprehended and indeed unknown by the great majority of the people of Bengal; the law administered was foreign to their ideas, and indeed the whole organisation was, by Indian standards of the time, hopelessly impersonal. Lord Cornwallis succeeded, indeed, in establishing a high standard of integrity in administration, but he made the mistake of trying to interpret India in terms of British thought.

The unsoundness of the Cornwallis system was soon realised at home, and gradually the administrative tendencies initiated by him were put into reverse. Collectors were given some judicial functions relating to revenue, and in a Regulation of 1821 it was laid down that they might be authorised to act as magistrates. In 1831 Collectors generally took over the magisterial work of the judges, but in 1837 the theory of the separation of powers once more began to be a governing factor and for a time many districts had three separate principal officers—a judge, a magistrate and a collector. This was, however, a very temporary retrogression, and, a little later, power began to be concentrated again in the hands of the Collectors. Just after the Mutiny, which had perhaps revealed the weakness of the previous organisation, the modern system, under which revenue, magisterial and police functions are united under the control of the Collector, while major criminal matters are reserved for the District Judge, came into effect. The Collector, or Deputy commissioner as he was called in the newer provinces, became the ‘Ma-Bap’ or mother and father of the district, while the District Judge rightly assumed a position of aloofness which in due course did much to strengthen public faith in the courts.

In this chapter we have concentrated mainly on developments in Bengal, because that province as the seat of the Governor-General became the pattern of administration, at least for the three Presidencies.

In Madras real English administration began later than in Bengal, and in 1794 Collectors with wide administrative powers were appointed. The Cornwallis system naturally affected developments in Madras, too, and for a time, therefore, the Collector was confined to revenue functions. By 1818, however, thanks largely to the influence of Munro, one of the greatest of Indian Civil Servants, the Cornwallis system was brought to an end and from 1818 the Collector became the effective head of the district. It was not only with regard to principles of organisation that Munro disagreed radically with the Cornwallis system. He felt even more strongly on the question of the employment of Indians in superior posts. Cornwallis was frankly in favour of putting Europeans into all important positions, whereas Munro, like Elphinstone, Malcolm and indeed most of the great administrators of the period, believed firmly in the spirit later enshrined in the 1833 Charter Act, that no Indian should be disqualified by race from holding any office, however high. It might almost be said that in the first half of the nineteenth century the civil servants were pro-Indian and the British politician-administrators anti-Indian.

It is not possible to follow in detail the developments in the newer provinces. The growth of administration there was conditioned, first by the fact that unsettled areas where government had to be based frankly on military strength and where the administrator had to be prepared to deal with incipient rebellion, naturally required a more rough-and-ready kind of rule. There had, moreover, been a reaction in the minds of British administrators against the over-legalistic system which had been developed in Bengal, Madras and Bombay and which had not altogether yielded the happy results predicted by Lord Cornwallis and those of his school. The careful definition of rights and obligations had often played into the hands of the ruthless and the strong and it had been abundantly proved that the mere existence of machinery for the protection of the rights of the poor often meant little. In the newer provinces, therefore, the Acts or Regulations which had been enforced in the three Presidencies were not generally applied and these areas thus came to be known as Non-Regulation Provinces. As Sir Patrick Fagan says—‘the type of administration adopted in Non-Regulation areas was characterised by simple and more direct methods of procedure and by the greater accessibility of the officials to the people; but chiefly by the union of all powers—executive, magisterial and judicial—in the hands of the District Officer, here termed Deputy Commissioner, subject, however, to the appellate and supervisional jurisdiction of the Commissioner of the Division in all branches of work. The system was paternal rather than formally legal though legal principles were by no means set aside and it largely depended for its success on the personal character, initiative, vigour and discretion of the local officers.’

The principle in these Non-Regulation Provinces was that the right man must be selected and that he should then be left to do justice according to circumstances. This did not mean that he exercised arbitrary power. He was bound by certain defined principles and was more closely subject to the personal supervision of his superiors than was the case in those provinces where everything had been reduced to rules and regulations. The Non-Regulation system was at its best in the Punjab, where it threw up, in the mixed military and civil commission, some of the finest characters in Indian administration. The importance of the Deputy Commissioners in the Non-Regulation Provinces in due course strengthened the position of the Collector in the older provinces, and in the second half of the nineteenth century it is no exaggeration to describe the District Officer as the focal point of the Indian administrative system. His duties were so varied that it is difficult to describe them briefly, for while at one time his revenue work might be of primary importance, at another time his energy would be mainly devoted to the suppression of crime, while in more tranquil districts he might be able to concentrate largely on the development of roads, sanitation, dispensaries, agriculture and irrigation. Above all, it was his duty to know the people in his district and to press their needs and difficulties upon the Government of the day. Even in modern times District Officers have generally developed a kind of local patriotism which has made them fight for the interests of their own district against all comers. This often produced a certain narrowness and did not always fit the District Officer for the higher posts which he might have to assume later; it did, however, ensure that he regarded himself as the friend of the people and that they in their turn came, not only to trust him, but to regard him as the beginning and end of government. Like all forms of personal rule, this system had grave defects, but it was a great improvement on what went before it and it achieved good results which would not otherwise have been attained.

In one sense, during the hundred years between Plassey and the Mutiny the wheel had turned full circle and the Company had come back to the old Mughal view that all executive power must be concentrated in the hands of the local representative of the Government. However much the theory of checks and balances had been retained in the higher levels of Government—as for example between India and the Home authorities—in the sphere of district administration it had been completely discarded. Paternal and authoritarian rule had been restored. In spirit and in principle there were indeed great differences between British rule in the nineteenth century and that of the Hindu and Muslim emperors. The rule of law had been established in place of arbitrary power; toleration for all religions was accepted as a principle of state; and the equality of all men before the law had been declared. These were indeed fundamental changes; but in the machinery, as distinct from the spirit of government, the Company had to a great extent restored the systematic and efficient administration of Akbar. There was, however, one marked change. Whereas the administration of Akbar operated effectively only over a comparatively limited area, the authority of the British Crown, after the Mutiny, was unchallenged throughout India and the relentless uniformity of British administration began to mould all India into one pattern.

Chapter XVIII

British Revenue Administration

As we have seen in an earlier chapter the Mughal revenue system was based on the immemorial theory that the king was entitled to a share of the produce of all land and that he might realise it either by direct collection or by assignment. Under Akbar this theory was crystallised into a well-defined set of regulations which not only specified the rights of the king but also laid down at least the standard obligation of the individual cultivator. That system had largely broken down long before the Company stood forth as Diwan, and the Company inherited only confusion. Baden-Powell, the leading authority on this subject, rightly points out that ‘some theory or practice of revising the assessment, some customary period for such revision might have been expected, but none was left us’. Such revisions were occasionally made in the last hundred years of Muslim rule, but more frequently increased revenue was secured by the imposition of additional cesses. These cesses can scarcely be called illegal, for no theoretical limitation on the power of the emperor in this respect was acknowledged, but they were often arbitrary and had no uniform relation to the capacity of the cultivator to pay.

The extent of these exactions can best be realised by a study of the progressive figures of imperial demand. Such figures, collected from the official Mughal records are most easily found in the celebrated Fifth Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1812—a report which is a mine of information on all revenue matters. It appears that from the time of Akbar in the middle of the sixteenth century to the settlement of Murshid Quli Khan, the Viceroy of Bengal in 1722, the changes in the imperial demand were not significant. In that period the demand from Bengal rose from Rs. 1,06,93,152 to Rs. 1,42,88,186. Part of this increase was accounted for by conquest and by transfer to Bengal lands from other subas, and the increase in the incidence of revenue may be regarded as negligible, even though Murshid Quli Khan had introduced new cesses. From 1722, however, the practice of imposing additional cesses or abwabs became more common, and by 1763 the demand had risen to Rs. 2,66,24,223.

This practice, instituted by the revenue authorities, was soon followed by the zemindars or assignees. Additional impositions on the cultivators might thus result either from an increase in the imperial demand or from the zemindar’s belief that he could screw more out of his tenants. When the Mughal administration was in its full vigour, the emperors had considered it their duty to protect the peasants; assignees and revenue farmers were therefore required to keep detailed account of their collections. Moreover, the accounts for areas still under the direct collection of the revenue authorities provided material for a rough-and-ready check on the zemindari accounts. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, direct collection had become unusual. Most of the lands of the empire were either held by revenue farmers or by zemindars, who during the decline of the imperial power had become almost hereditary. As long as they paid their revenue zemindars and revenue farmers alike were then almost independent of the revenue authorities. The power of the district officials, which under Akbar had been the principal safeguard of the cultivator, had been broken. The qanungos and village accountants had largely ceased to be state or even village officials and had become the servants of the zemindar. Reliable statements of village collections were thus no longer available to the state, and when in 1769 the East India Company established supervisors to collect such information the qanungos and village accountants, in collusion with the zemindar, easily thwarted the attempt.

When the East India Company took over responsibility for collecting the land revenue in Bengal a revision of the assessment was clearly overdue, but no machinery for this purpose existed. The company had no accurate knowledge either of the capacity of the cultivator to pay or of the amounts which zemindars and farmers had in practice been in the habit of realising. The position was made even worse by the order of the Company discharging the Mofussil qanungos or district revenue officers, who were regarded as largely responsible for the corruption of the old system. The Company’s servants, of whom Kaye said that they were dead hands at investment but knew nothing of land tenures, were thus left without any expert advice. They adopted what was perhaps the only practicable course and put all estates out to farm by public auction to the highest bidder. The existing zemindars were in practice given no preference, and indeed in some areas they were discouraged from bidding. This settlement, which was made for five years, proved most unsatisfactory. The revenue farmers were in many cases mere speculators, with no permanent interest in the zemindaris, prepared to overbid if necessary and determined thereafter to extort the maximum from the cultivators during their five-year period. There is no reason to think that the Company encouraged over-assessment, and in fact there is evidence of genuine, though ineffective, efforts to protect the cultivators.

Assessments were nevertheless excessive and became more so as a result of the disastrous effects of the 1770 famine. Of that famine the President in Council wrote that ‘the mortality, the beggary exceeds all description’, and Warren Hastings estimated that as a result of it the population of Bengal had been reduced by one-third.

It was, indeed, unfortunate that the Company’s first attempt at a settlement should coincide with such exceptional distress, but, even without the famine, the five-year settlement would have proved unworkable. Heavy arrears soon accrued; revenue farmers in many places absconded; zemindars were imprisoned for default and substantial remissions had to be given. The attempts of the Company to protect the cultivators under this five-year settlement had been equally unsuccessful. They had ordered the discontinuance of many oppressive cesses; they had directed the revenue farmers to grant to their tenants leases specifying the exact conditions of the tenancies, and they had pronounced penalties against extortion. The machinery to enforce these objects had still to be created.

The five-year settlement came to an end in 1776 and thereafter annual settlements were the normal practice until 1789. They differed little in principle from the five-year settlement, except that genuine attempts were made to effect them with the original zemindars rather than with upstart revenue farmers. Little progress towards a satisfactory settlement was made in the time of Warren Hastings; the natural bias of his mind towards centralisation was against effective collectorships or other local agencies and so delayed the acquisition of detailed knowledge regarding revenue matters. Sir John Shore, perhaps the greatest revenue authority of the day, declared in 1782 that the ‘real state of the districts is now less known and the revenue less understood than in 1774’ and it was not until the decentralisation of authority to make revenue settlements took place in 1786 that further progress was possible.

In the time of Lord Cornwallis the momentous decision known as the Permanent Settlement of Bengal was taken after prolonged discussions in which the leading parts were played by Sir John Shore (President of the Board of Revenue), Mr. James Grant (Chief Sheristadar or Record Keeper) and Cornwallis himself. Three main questions were in issue: With whom should the settlement be made? What should be the amount of the assessment? Should it be a permanent settlement or one for a term of years?

The first of these questions depended to some extent on the view taken as to the position of the zemindar. Was he merely the collecting agency with no proprietary rights at all or was he, in a real sense, the landlord? Grant maintained vigorously that the zemindar had no permanent right; that the state was the owner of all lands and could employ or discard the zemindar as its collecting agent at its discretion. Shore held equally strongly that, subject to payment of revenue, the zemindar was the proprietor. He argued that in Mughal times the zemindar, whose settlement was not renewed, was, as of right, given an allowance known as malikana and that a similar practice had been followed by the Company itself in all its settlements since acquiring the Diwani.

It is difficult to decide on purely abstract grounds between these two views, for they depend on two different estimates of the stage which a particular historical process had reached. There can be little doubt that in the early Mughal period the zemindar held his position purely at the pleasure of the emperor; while by the beginning of the eighteenth century he had made his position, in general, hereditary and was able to demand and receive malikana if settlement was not made with him. Shore maintained in effect that the historical process was complete—which Grant denied.

There was, however, a strong practical argument in favour of settlement with the zemindar, namely, the absence of any real alternative. The Company’s administration was not sufficiently developed to make a direct settlement with the cultivators practicable. Shore’s statement that such a settlement required ‘a degree of knowledge, experience and application in the collectors which is rarely to be found or obtained’ was not seriously challenged. The second alternative, of letting the estates be farmed, had been thoroughly discredited by experience from 1772 onwards. Cornwallis, who was not in the least interested in the legal controversies as to the rights of the zemindar, had no hesitation in accepting Shore’s view on this point.

The second great question was as to what should be the amount of the settlement, and this proved more difficult of resolution. Grant, with vast theoretical knowledge, proposed that the settlement should be based on the highest Mughal assessment, namely that in force in 1765. He maintained not only that that assessment was actually realised, but also that it was in the capacity of the cultivator to pay. Shore, who was essentially a practical revenue officer, considered that Bengal was already over-assessed. He argued that the eighteenth-century Mughal assessments were never realised and could therefore not provide a basis for a new assessment; that it was not practicable to evaluate the theoretical one-fourth share of the produce; that the 1770 famine had reduced the capacity of the province to pay; and that the only sound basis would be the Collectors’ reports on actual collections, qualified by their views as to the economic condition of the peasantry.

Shore’s view of the real revenue-paying capacity of Bengal at the time was probably more nearly correct than that of Grant, though Shore himself maintained that the material for any accurate assessment did not exist. The Court of Directors laid it down that a moderate assessment ‘regularly and punctually collected unites the consideration of their interest with the happiness of the natives, and security of the landholders more rationally than any imperfect collection of an exaggerated jumma to be enforced with severity and exaction.’ They therefore accepted something like Shore’s view, and according to the Fifth Report ‘a medium of the actual produce to Government, in former years, drawn from the scanty information which the Collectors have the power of procuring, was the basis on which the assessment of each estate, whether large or small, was ultimately fixed’.

The third main issue was as to the period for which settlement should be made. The Regulating Act had directed that permanent rules should be established by which the revenue of zemindars ‘should in future be rendered and paid’, and the Court of Directors considered that this involved a permanent fixation of the revenue. They decided, however, on an initial settlement for a period of ten years. Soon after his arrival in India Lord Cornwallis realised that further investigations were required, but by 1789 he had become a confirmed supporter of a permanent settlement. Shore, who was his chief revenue adviser, agreed that the zemindars should be guaranteed continuity, and indeed he would have declared them to be proprietors, but was strongly opposed to any present attempts to fix the revenue permanently. He argued that experience was still inadequate for such a purpose, that until estate boundaries were surveyed any equitable distribution of the assessment would be impossible, that revenue was likely to fall within ten years and that a redistribution of the assessment would be the only way of recovering that loss. To this Cornwallis replied, firstly, that a permanent settlement was a logical corollary to the recognition of the proprietary rights of the zemindar, and secondly, that it would lead the zemindars to improve their properties, whereas the ten-year lease would provide no such inducement. ‘I may safely assert,’ said Cornwallis as reported in the minutes of the East India Company of 1789, ‘that one-third of the Company’s territory in Hindustan is now a jungle, inhabited only by wild beasts. Will a ten-years’ lease induce any proprietor to clear away that jungle, and encourage the raiyots to come and cultivate his lands, when at the end of that lease he must either submit to be taxed ad libitum for their newly cultivated land or lose all hopes of deriving any benefit from his labour?’ Again and again Cornwallis returned to this theme. ‘In a country where a landlord has a permanent property in the soil, it will be worth his while to encourage his tenants who hold his farm in lease to improve their property.’ He could not, or would not, distinguish between permanency of tenure and unchangeability of revenue.

Cornwallis was undoubtedly influenced by his conception of the duties of an English landlord, and indeed throughout this controversy he seems to have thought of the zemindar in that light. It is now generally agreed that Cornwallis was mistaken in his policy of a permanent settlement, but it was strongly supported from home, and Shore’s cogent arguments were never given due weight. In 1790 a decennial settlement with the zemindars was made, and in 1791 it was declared to be permanent. In his proclamation of March 1793 the Governor-General and Council accordingly declared ‘to the zemindars, independent talookdars and other actual proprietors of land, with or on behalf of a settlement, has been concluded under the regulations above-mentioned, that at the expiration of the time of the settlement, no alteration will be made in the assessment which they have respectively engaged to pay but that they and their heirs and lawful successors will be allowed to hold their estates at such assessment for ever’.

For some generations the Permanent Settlement continued to be a subject of controversy. Curiously enough, early Indian nationalists were inclined to commend it, while most English officials perhaps considered it a mistake. Of recent years all Indian politicians have condemned it, and most students of the subject would now agree that it achieved practically none of the results at which it aimed. As regards immediate effects, it benefited neither the zemindars, the raiyats nor the state.

Cornwallis believed that the new sense of security which the measure would engender in the zemindars would lead them to spend money on improving their properties. In reality they lost the practical security which in large measure they had possessed before the Permanent Settlement. During the Mughal period defaulting zemindars might be flogged or imprisoned or otherwise made to pay, but they were not normally dispossessed for default. In British times, although the East India Company had claimed the right to sell defaulting zemindaris, hitherto it had seldom exercised it. We are told in the Fifth Report that ‘although the engagement entered into for the five-year settlement contained a clause subjecting the land to sale for the recovery of arrears, it does not appear that the measure was anywhere resorted to for that purpose, although heavy balances occurred which to a considerable extent proved irrecoverable’.

Far different was the case under the Permanent Settlement where the law inexorably decreed the sale of an estate if the revenue was not paid by sunset on the latest day. The sunset law was regarded with abhorrence by the zemindars, to whom this procedure seemed far harsher and more unconscionable than the cruder methods of the Mughals. According to the report of the Collector of Midnapor in 1802 the zemindars’ view was that ‘such a harsh and oppressive system was never before resorted to in this country . . . that, though it was no doubt the intention of government to confer an important benefit on them . . . it had been found by melancholy experience that the system of sales and attachments . . . has in the course of a few years reduced most of the great zemindars in Bengal to distress and beggary, and produced a greater change in the landed property of Bengal than has, perhaps, ever happened in the same space of time, in any age or country, by the mere effect of internal regulations’. This bitter complaint was amply borne out by the cold official figures. In the two-year period 1897–8, estates worth 17 per cent of the total revenue of Bengal were sold for default. In many cases, so great was the sense of insecurity that no bidders were forthcoming. Thanks to the cruel rigidity of the system, some of the greatest estates of the province were broken up and the cynical statement of the Calcutta Government that this had the satisfactory result of dividing those estates and transferring them to more capable hands was a signal commentary on Lord Cornwallis’ hope of greater stability. His system in fact went far to destroy what remained of the hereditary aristocracy of Bengal. In many cases they were replaced by men of a new type with no traditional connections with the land—speculators who would have laughed heartily at Cornwallis’ vision of an enlightened zemindar spending money on the improvement of his properties. They provided the first foundation for that absenteeism amongst landlords which in later times was to deprive Bengal of any natural leadership, and in due course to stir up a demand for the abolition of the zemindari system.

It is scarcely necessary to discuss in detail the financial loss to Bengal which resulted from the Permanent Settlement. Even in the early stages the numerous revenue sales often resulted in resettlement at less than the original revenue. The provincial land revenues settled down at a figure rather less than the 1793 assessment, until in the second quarter of the nineteenth century the resumption of land illegally held revenue free, together with the practice of direct settlement with cultivators in cases where land had been sold for arrears or default, led to substantial increases. During the nineteenth century the restored tranquillity of the country, together with the development of communications, ushered in an era of intensive cultivation and increased rent. The benefit of these increases went solely to the zemindars; and Vincent Smith, a competent authority on this subject, had estimated the annual loss to the state as a result of the Permanent Settlement at not less than three crores of rupees.

Mr. Seton-Karr, in a careful study of this whole matter, while concluding that the Permanent Settlement was a mistake, puts forward an interesting argument in its favour. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘for the first time in Oriental history we see the spectacle of a foreign ruler binding himself and his successors to abstain from periodical revisions of the land tax; almost creating a new race of landlords; giving to property another title than the sword of its owner or the favour of a viceroy; and content to leave to the zemindar the whole profit resulting from increased population and undisturbed peace.’ There is no doubt that ideas like this were much in the mind of Cornwallis; but the educated Bengal of the day must have been far less impressed with these benevolent motives than with the spectacle of the many zemindars whose estates were sold under the sunset law. When the first generation had passed and a reasonable degree of stability had again been restored, considerations of the kind mentioned began indeed to count for a good deal, but, as Mr. Seton-Karr himself observes, that result could have been equally well achieved by long-term but temporary settlements. There can be little doubt that the Permanent Settlement was a serious mistake and that the first important incursion of the British into the sphere of land-revenue reform did harm rather than good.

The Permanent Settlement, which did such harm to the zemindars, conferred no compensating benefit on the cultivators, zemindars did not spend money on improvements—and indeed the expectation of Cornwallis in this respect was based on complete ignorance of the workings of Bengal zemindaris. Bengal landlords were—as they are today—concerned mainly with settling waste lands and seldom bothered even to cultivate their own home farms efficiently, still less to encourage better cultivation by their tenants. Even in the twentieth century such improvements as have been effected in agriculture in Bengal have been brought about mainly by government pressure and initiative. The Permanent Settlement completely failed to produce any effect in this direction. Nor did the relevant Regulation afford any kind of protection to the cultivator though it held out promises that something would be done. The peasant had well-known customary rights, and Cornwallis seems to have assumed that the judicial system, which he had reorganised, would enable them to defend those rights. Here again he was misled by lack of practical experience. Thanks to his insistence on keeping all-important judicial posts in European hands, the courts were far too few in number and cases fell hopelessly in arrear. At the same time, the introduction of complicated and novel Western forms of procedure bewildered the peasant and left him an easy prey to exploitation. For many years he had no defence against the zemindar, except that provided by combinations to withhold payment of rent.

The failure of the East India Company to protect the raiyat, or cultivator, at the time of the Permanent Settlement was due partly to over-anxiety for the realisation of the land revenue and partly to ignorance of the system of land tenure. That ignorance was so marked in such attempts as were made, that it is perhaps a good thing that the law of landlord and tenant was not systematised until many years later when the problem was thoroughly understood. At the time of the Permanent Settlement the authorities seemed to assume that there were officially accepted rates of rent for each parganah; that raiyats were protected by customary rights and that it was only necessary to provide an adequate civil court procedure for the enforcement of those rights.

None of these assumptions was sound. Two hundred years earlier the parganah rates may have been a reality, but the rule of the eighteenth century had been ‘devil take the hindmost’ and uniformity had disappeared. At the time of the Permanent Settlement half of the land of Bengal was waste and within twenty years half of the remainder had changed hands under a law which annulled existing contracts and conditions. Three-quarters of Bengal was thus available for lease on whatever form of contract might prove acceptable to landlord and tenant. Thus neither parganah rates nor customary rights availed to protect the majority of the peasants of Bengal.

The desire to protect them, provided this did not seriously affect revenue, was there from the beginning. The Supervisors appointed in 1769 were ‘to convince the raiyat that Government will stand between him and the hand of oppression . . . and to secure him against all further invasions of his property’; and Lord Cornwallis continually gave expression to similar sentiments. The practical-minded Shore knew, however, that these aspirations meant little unless the rights of the raiyat could be defined. He spoke of a country where ‘discretion has so long been the measure of exaction’, and he urged that there should be no permanent settlement until the rights and payments of the zemindar and the raiyat had been defined. Cornwallis, the theorist, would have none of this, so while the Permanent Settlement Regulations did something for the higher grade of tenant, and a little for the old resident raiyat, it left most raiyats with no protection except the right to receive leases—and because of official preoccupation with the matter of revenue it limited those leases to a ten-year period.

Even the obligation of the landlord to grant written leases came to nothing in practice, largely because raiyats, who strangely preferred the less defined arrangements of the Mughal Empire, were suspicious of them. In 1799, to make matters worse, a much hated ‘Seventh Regulation’ gave zemindars a cruel power of direct distraint on defaulting cultivators. It is difficult to understand this harsh provision until one realises how much the law in England at that time was weighted in favour of the aristocracy against the lower classes and how much the conception of the British rulers of India was necessarily affected by the philosophy of the home country.

In 1812 the first step towards reform was taken by the removal of the ten-year limitation on leases to raiyats, but this was followed by retrograde measures which strengthened the zemindar’s power at the expense of the cultivator.

In 1859 a long step forward was taken. Occupancy rights—which may roughly be described as the right to continue permanently in possession subject to payment of rent—were conferred on raiyats who had been in continuous possession of the same land for twelve years. This, however, could have been of little value if landlords had possessed an indefinite right of enhancing rent, and considerable limitations on this right were therefore introduced. This process was carried further by the great Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. The subject is much too technical for analysis here and it need only be said that the Act further developed the conception of occupancy rights, ended the right of the landlords to distrain, further limited the ground on which rent could be enhanced, and protected the cultivator by preventing him from contracting out of the rights given to him by the Act.

In matters of tenancy reform facts are apt to outstrip legislation. When the scheme of the Bengal Tenancy Act for protecting the raiyat was first considered he was perhaps as a rule the actual cultivator; but by the end of the century many persons having the legal status of raiyats had become in fact sub-landlords, while the cultivating tenants who were under-raiyats did not secure the full protection which the framers of the act intended. In rough general terms, however, it may be said that the legislation of 1859 and 1885 undid the harm done by the omissions in the Permanent Settlement regulation and gave to the raiyat protection commensurate with that given to the zemindar. The scheme was now balanced and a security and stability never before known in India in these matters was achieved. A bad start had been retrieved in Bengal and the genuine intention of those who framed the regulations for the supervisors in 1769 had been realised after more than a century.

In the Madras Presidency land-revenue administration pursued a different course from that of Bengal—partly because the Madras authorities were wise enough to proceed by trial and error and partly because of the different historical background of the two Presidencies. In large areas of Madras there was nothing like the Bengal zemindari system, and there was therefore less temptation to introduce the English concept of the landlord. The Presidency was brought under direct British administration in three main stages. First, came the Northern Sircars, granted to the East India Company by the Emperor in 1765—the Nizam concurred in 1766. This area had formed part of the later Mughal Empire and the zemindari system, which had prevailed in it, was continued under the Company’s administration. Next came the area known as the Jagir, consisting of Madras and the surrounding districts, in which the Company initiated a direct administration only in 1780, though it had been in their possession earlier. Here maladministration and chaos had been prevalent. There was no zemindari system on which to build and the Company’s officers at that time knew little of the traditional village settlements. Not unnaturally they began by farming out the revenue, but this system failed within a few years, and after a period during which attempts were made at direct settlement with cultivators the Company turned to the old idea of a village settlement, of which more will be said presently.

Most of the remainder of the Presidency came under the management of the Company between 1792 and 1802 as a result of the Mysore wars, or by cession from the Nizam, or by compulsory transfer from the Newab of the Carnatic. In most of this area the zemindari system had never prevailed and the Company was at a loss as to how to proceed. There were in some districts military chiefs known as polygars, but they were in many respects unsuitable for treatment as landlords. Many of them were little more than bandit leaders, and according to Gleig: ‘When the ceded districts were transferred to the Company’s rule, there were scattered through them, exclusive of the Nizam’s troops, about 30,000 armed peons, the whole of whom, under the command of the chief polygars, subsisted by rapine and committed everywhere the greatest excesses.’ They were, moreover, bitterly hostile to the British administration, and except for a few, who recognised the signs of the times and became zemindars, most of them either disappeared or became pensioners of the Company.

There was thus no clear pattern for the Company to follow. In pre-British days strong rulers in Southern India had carried on revenue administration through their own officers, known as amildars, who normally made settlements with the village headmen. Less powerful princes let the revenue be farmed, or dealt with zemindars or chiefs, who might themselves deal either with cultivators or with village units, but who were almost uniformly oppressive. Perhaps the commonest method was that under which a settlement was made with the village headman who was left to apportion the demand according to his will and ability amongst the cultivators. Reasonable security of tenure was afforded the cultivator by the existence of a good deal of uncultivated land, and the terms on which he held were determined partly according to village customs and partly according to the power of the ruler to extract more. In the last resort the economic condition of the village must have been a determining factor.

The Madras authorities wisely embarked on a period of experimentation. One of the most important of the experimental areas was that known as the Baramahal or what is now the district of Salem, where two military officers, Captain Read and Thomas Munro (afterwards Sir Thomas Munro), made an intensive study of the whole subject and formed very strong views against zemindari settlements in these areas where no tradition of that kind existed. Captain Read made a settlement direct with the cultivators and rashly promised that the rate of rent would remain forever unchanged, but that they would have the right to relinquish or take over fresh land if they wished. A thorough field survey was made, but unfortunately rents were fixed too high and became more unreasonable when prices subsequently fell. The idea of a permanently fixed rent was therefore dropped. Munro worked on similar lines in the ceded districts, but again the Board of Revenue fixed the rent too high.

Much valuable experience had now been gained, but, unfortunately, from 1798 onwards the Governor-General began to insist on the introduction of the Bengal system; permanent zemindari settlements were to be made everywhere, and the protests of men like Read and Munro were overruled. The arrangement was defensible in areas such as the Northern Circars, where it was in keeping with the past, but elsewhere it involved a wholly artificial grouping of villages, the groups being auctioned to revenue farmers. It was not only in the revenue sphere that the Cornwallis principles were still at work. In the field of general administration the Collectors for a time ceased to be all-powerful, the District Judge became the District Magistrate, too, and the cultivator, deprived of the executive protection of the Collector, was left to fight for himself in the courts.

The new zemindari system broke down in many places—perhaps not so much because it was a bad system, as because assessments were too high. A large number of estates were sold and, in the absence of bidders, again came under government management. This provided an opportunity to start afresh, and by 1808 the reaction against the zemindari system had set in. The views of Munro and Read had been generally accepted. Fresh experiments with village and raiyatwari settlements were initiated. There were now two schools of thought. The Munro or raiyatwari school favoured direct settlement with individual cultivators, while the Board of Revenue supported the idea of corporate village settlements. In certain districts of Southern India villages had been owned by mirasdars, who acted jointly on behalf of the village and with whom, in the jagir, settlement had been made. The system had worked fairly well there, and the Board of Revenue now proposed to lease entire villages either to mirasdars or to the village headmen everywhere. This was as unsound as the proposal to introduce an artificial zemindari system. It might be admirable in villages which had a tradition of joint action, but there were many areas where no such tradition existed and where the system, therefore, had no chance of success. It was, however, widely applied and many ten-year settlements were made in 1808 and 1809 with mirasdars, with principle inhabitants of villages jointly, or with village headmen. It was envisaged that these settlements would eventually become permanent.

This system, too, on the whole failed, not only because of its artificial character in many districts, but also because, in the absence of proper records and accounts, assessments were too high. Most Collectors advised the discontinuance of this scheme, but the Board of Revenue and the Madras Government were wedded to it and embarked on a second ten-year period of settlements. At this stage, however, the famous fifth Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons came down heavily in favour of the ideas of Munro, and from 1812 onwards the Madras Government began to introduce the raiyatwari system everywhere except in areas which had already been permanently settled.

An essential feature of the raiyatwari system, as now introduced, was that every tenant was free to relinquish one or more of his fields at the time of the annual settlement and to take up available fresh fields if he wished. The foundation of the system was thus an initial survey and an annual stock-taking of the position. It is a different process from settlement in those parts of India where ‘there is something like a bargain struck between the landowner (or the village body) and the Government officer’. The Madras settlement ‘goes straight to the land, and determines, according to its own rules and principles, what that field or survey-unit ought to pay, no matter who holds it’. It goes on, of course, to work out the accounts for the year of the cultivators who have actually held the various fields.

The final step towards complete individual settlement had not yet been taken, for once settlement had been made every resident cultivator was jointly responsible for the rent of the entire village.

The system introduced in the Madras Presidency in the years following 1812 has been maintained with two important developments. In the first place, the principle of joint responsibility has been abandoned. Each cultivator is responsible only for his own rent. Secondly, any idea of ultimately making the settlement permanent has been given up and thirty years is now the regular term of settlement. Raiyats have the right to transfer or sub-let their holdings and cannot be evicted by the Government provided they pay their rent. They are, in fact, proprietors with the additional advantage that they can abandon all or part of their holdings whenever they so wish.

It is neither possible nor necessary in this book here to study the revenue systems of other provinces. Enough has been said to show that the problem was approached in the different areas from two entirely different angles. In Bengal, English preconceptions, combined with an unwillingness to learn by experience, produced the Permanent Settlement which is generally admitted to have been a mistake. In Madras, in spite of times when there was a danger of acceptance of the Bengal principles, the authorities were prepared to proceed by trial and error, and so produced a system which has worked well and which suited the circumstances. Finally, it may be noticed that the Select Committee of the House of Commons had a sounder appreciation of the position than either the Calcutta or the Madras authorities and that their intervention saved the Madras Government from persisting in a mistaken course.

Chapter XIX

British Famine Administration

No better illustration of the pace and methods of growth of British administration could be found than the development of the organisation to deal with famine. It began with uncertainty and even with some unreadiness to interfere with the normal operations of trade and agriculture; it went on, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, to a phase of experiment, mistakes and lack of co-ordination; while from 1880 onwards a scientific clearcut policy was established.

It is a commonplace of books on India that the sub-continent contains as many distinct geographical regions as Europe and includes climatic conditions varying from the almost rainless desert of Sindh to the steamy swamps of Bengal and Assam. It could therefore be predicated, even without the help of experience, that, while there would never be a drought throughout all India, almost every year the crops would fail in some particular province or district. Such local failures are not normally disastrous under modern conditions, but in days when communications were poor and transport inadequate, or in time of war and political disturbance, they might well mean hunger and starvation for those who lived in the affected areas. It is therefore not surprising that famine should occupy a large place in Indian history and tradition.

Early Buddhist literature is full of references to famine, and there is a Jain tradition of a saint who, having predicted a twelve-year famine, led twelve thousand of his disciples to the south when his prediction began to come true. It is interesting to note that this idea of a twelve-year famine, in itself improbable in the light of modern experience, recurs several times in Indian literature. In Kashmir, Kalhana, the twelfth-century Brahman historian, writes of two great floods, one in A.D. 917 and the second in A.D. 1099 when the land ‘became like one great burial ground’. At least four widespread famines occurred in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but they pale into insignificance beside the great famine of 1345. It is well recognised today that the effects of a crop failure depend not only on its extent and severity but also on the economic condition of the people at its commencement.

In the second quarter of the fourteenth century the people of large parts of upper India perhaps suffered as much misery as has ever been inflicted upon a people by an insane monarch. Muhammad Tughlaq was a man of unbalanced mind—a curious mixture of visionary and tyrant. His forcible removal of the entire population from Delhi to Deogharh and his long-continued tyranny were followed by fantastic schemes for limitless expansion of the currency, which dislocated all trade and agriculture and filled the hearts of the people with despair. They were in no condition to stand up to one of the worst famines in Indian history, and, in the words of the contemporary chronicler, Zia Barni, ‘the glorious estate and the power of the Sultan Muhammad from this time withered and decayed’. No statistical computation of the loss of life is possible, but a graphic picture is painted for us by the Moorish traveller, Ibn Batuta, who says: ‘One day I went out to meet the Wazir and saw three women who were cutting to pieces and eating the skin of a horse which had been dead some months.’

Two great famines occurred in the reign of Akbar. In the first, in the year of Akbar’s accession, Badauni ‘with his own eyes witnessed the fact that men ate their own kind and the appearance of the famished sufferers was so hideous that one could scarcely look upon them’. And there are similar reports of the famine towards the close of Akbar’s reign in 1596.

Even more graphic accounts are available of the great famine in 1630, when continued drought produced widespread desolation. The principal English accounts of this famine are collected in the Hakluyt edition of the Travels of Peter Mundy. The President of Surat writes of ‘universall dearth over all this continent, of whose like in these parts noe former age hath record’; while James Bickford writes from Swally to the effect that ‘the poore people lye as a woefull spectacle to behould in our streetes and highwayes as wee passe along, dying and dead in great nombers’. A Dutch factor at Surat writes: ‘And when wee came into the cyty of Suratt, wee hardly could see anie living persons, where heretofore was thousands; and ther is so great a stanch of dead persons that the sound people that came into the towne were with the smell infected, and att the corners of the streets the dead laye 20 togeather, one upon thother, nobody buirying them. The mortallyty in this towne is and hath bin so great that there have dyed above 30,000 people.’ A Muslim chronicler, whose annals are reproduced in Elliott and Dowson’s great History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, tells us that ‘life was offered for a loaf but none would buy; rank was to be sold for a cake, but none cared for it.’

Perhaps the most terrible description of famine ever yet written is that by a Dutch senior merchant, Van Twist, who wrote of the situation in Madras.

‘So little rain fell,’ says Van Twist, ‘that the seed sown was lost and no grass grew. Cattle died. In towns and villages, fields and on roads, men lay dead in great numbers causing such a stink that it was terrible to use the ways. For want of grass, cattle fed on the corpses; men took the carcases of beasts to eat; some in desperation went about searching for bones that had been gnawed by dogs. . . .

‘As the famine increased, men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognise their condition; eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty, knuckles and knee caps showing prominently. One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery; wherever you went you saw nothing but corpses.

‘Men deserted their wives and children. Women sold themselves as slaves. Mothers sold their children. Children deserted by their parents sold themselves. Some families took poison and so died together; others threw themselves into the rivers. Mothers and children went to the river-bank and drowned themselves hand in hand, so that the rivers flowed full of corpses. Some ate carrion flesh. Others cut up the corpses of men and drew out the entrails to fill their own bellies; yes, men lying in the streets, not yet dead, were cut up by others; and men fed on living men, so that even in the streets and still more on road-journeys men ran a great danger of being murdered and eaten. . . .

‘Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied. . . . Some of our Dutchmen coming from Ahmadabad found some people sitting at a little fire where hands and feet were cooking, terrible things to see. Even worse was it in the village of Susuntra, where human flesh was sold in open market. This terrible divine punishment fell chiefly on the poor, who had nothing in store.’

This is a narrative, not of a journalist or professional historian, but of a hard-headed business man who himself witnessed the scenes that he described and who in due course attained high rank in Dutch overseas enterprise.

It is not necessary to multiply instances. Enough has been said to show that famine is not just the result of the great growth of population in recent centuries but has always been a normal feature of Indian life. It has sometimes been suggested by English writers that before the British period Indian rulers made no serious attempts to cope with famine; and, indeed, Vincent Smith goes so far as to say that ‘the ancient governments, Hindu or Mohammedan, did nothing as a rule in the way of famine relief’.

This generalisation is by no means just. If it were true, it would not only argue inhumanity but it would also show an astonishing lack of self-interest on the part of rulers whose income was derived from land revenue. The truth is, that famine relief and preventive measures were regarded both in Hindu and Muslim times as important elements in the policy of every competent ruler. Kautilya, whose treatise has been discussed in earlier chapters, devotes an important chapter in the Arthasastra to ‘Remedies against Natural Calamities’, and one section of this deals with famine. Gratuitous relief in the time of famine was to be given; seeds were to be distributed and public works were to be undertaken in order to provide employment. The king might also distribute ‘the hoarded income of the rich among the people’. If that failed, ‘the king with his subjects may emigrate to another kingdom with abundant harvest’ or he may ‘by hunting and fishing on a large scale provide the people with wild beasts, birds, elephants, tigers or fish’.

Sir Aurel Stein, one of the greatest authorities on Asiatic archaeology, describes the systematic regulation of a river in Kashmir in order to lessen the danger of floods which were the main cause of famine in that country. It is true that there were rulers who showed themselves callous and shortsighted in these matters. We are told by the historian Kalhana that in the two serious famines of the tenth and eleventh centuries in Kashmir those in authority enriched themselves at the expense of their starving subjects. This, however, was not the general spirit of Hindu rule.

In Muslim times, too, much attention was given to this aspect of administration. In the fourteenth century Sultan Ala-ud-din of Delhi insisted on the payment of rent in kind in order to establish great granaries as a famine reserve. In times of scarcity grain was sold from those granaries at normal prices, and private dealers were compelled, by the simple process of keeping them in gaol till they agreed, to sell at controlled rates. Similar controls were exercised over the prices asked by cultivators. These controls perhaps worked more effectively than those of recent times, because they were enforced by draconian methods. ‘Once or twice when the rains were deficient a market overseer reported that the price had risen half a jital and he received twenty blows with the stick. . . . If in such a season any poor reduced person went to the market, and did not get assistance, the overseer received his punishment whenever the fact found its way to the king’s ears.’ Little is known of the measures taken in the great famine towards the end of Akbar’s reign, but it is on record that, to use modern terms, a special official was put on famine relief duty.

For the great famine of 1630, we have many valuable sources of knowledge, and it is clear that Shahjahan exerted himself to the utmost to provide relief. Free grain was distributed, gratuitous relief was given out and public kitchens were opened. These measures were hopelessly inadequate, but they probably represented all that was possible then and they certainly did not suggest indifference on the part of the emperor or his officials. Fully effective famine relief measures demanded a higher degree of political organisation than was achieved at any time in India before the British period and the best of the Indian rulers failed in this matter, not through callousness or apathy, but through the lack of an adequate administration. At most, they were able to carry out relief measures in the capital or a few large towns and the rest of the country had to be left to take care of itself.

Five years after the grant of the Diwani and two years before the Company took over direct responsibility for administration, it had its first experience of famine in Bengal. A partial crop failure in 1768 was followed by a complete cessation of rain in the beginning of September 1769—a vital month for the aman paddy harvest in December on which Bengal largely depends for its food supply. Young paddy plants were destroyed and fresh transplantation was impossible, for the fields were ‘become like fields of dried straw’. The warnings of local native officers were not taken seriously, and when the spring harvest of 1770 was gathered in, the Council—perhaps with a false idea of the comparatively small part played by that harvest in the Bengal economy—accepted the advice of the Muslim Deputy Diwan and enhanced the land revenue by 10 per cent. Not till May 1770 did the Governor and Council realise the appalling calamity that had befallen Bengal. They then wrote to the Board of Directors that ‘the mortality, the beggary exceed all description. Above one-third of the inhabitants have perished in the once plentiful province of Purneah, and in other parts the misery is equal’. Numerous accounts exist in which the sufferings of the population are graphically described, but they are perhaps not so eloquent as the sober report of Warren Hastings that at least one-third of the population had lost their lives in the famine. The measures taken by the Company were hopelessly inadequate. They effectively stopped the hoarding of grain, they forbade exports of rice and they imported it on a small scale. They opened no relief works, they distributed practically no grain, and they placed firmly upon native shoulders the responsibility for charitable relief. Sir William Hunter, whose Annals of Rural Bengal contains a vivid account of this disaster, points out that ‘districts in which men were dying at the rate of twenty thousand a month received allotments of one hundred and fifty rupees. A provincial council gravely considers and magnanimously sanctions a grant of ten shillings worth of rice per diem for a starving population numbering four hundred thousand souls.’ The total cost to the Company of relief operations seems to have been £9,000 sterling, and even against this is to be set a profit of £6,739 on the import of rice.

The failure of the Company to understand the nature of the calamity at the outset may reasonably be set down as inexperience and ignorance; but the lack of any adequate subsequent attempts to mitigate the results of the famine can only be characterised as a complete shirking of the responsibilities which had passed to the Company. The English conscience was not yet aroused with regard to India, and natives were still considered of little importance except as a source of wealth.

The famine itself ended with the winter harvest of 1770, but its effects were profound and lasting. Under the Mughal revenue system, which still prevailed, those cultivators who survived were held responsible for the rents of their co-villagers. Many fled to escape this burden. Thus the ultimate depopulation was even greater than the number of deaths. Land went out of cultivation, the cotton industry was hard hit by the disappearance of many weavers, trade declined, and twenty years later Cornwallis stated that one-third of the Company’s possessions in Bengal were ‘jungle inhabited only by wild beasts’.

In 1783–4 a famine of even greater dimensions afflicted India, but its worst effects were felt outside the Company’s jurisdiction. In Bengal the Company, now conscious of its previous failure, was unduly nervous and placed an embargo on the export of grain. This was probably unnecessary and resulted in serious famine in Madras, which was accustomed to import grain from Bengal and where crops had failed seriously. It was realised in this famine that the lack of employment for agricultural labourers, consequent on drought conditions which made work impossible, could be almost as serious in its effects as an actual shortage of food. Attempts were made to move labourers to the less affected areas. It would be just to say that in this famine genuine efforts were made to cope with the situation, though with indifferent success.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Company had become fully conscious of its responsibilities in these matters. For another eighty years its famine policy was to be vacillating, unco-ordinated and sometimes doctrinaire, but no longer could it be accused of callousness. This new attitude was apparent in the severe and widespread famine of 1804. In the Bombay Presidency, where matters had been made worse by the Maratha invasions and the Pindari raids, grain was imported by the Government and sold at a fixed price while public works were started to provide employment. In Oudh, instead of importing grain itself, the Company gave a bounty on imports and also granted loans to landowners. The 1807 famine in the Madras Presidency was somewhat less severe and is chiefly of interest for two reasons. In the first place, there was a controversy—which continued long afterwards—as to whether the movement of grain could best be stimulated by government imports or by the action of private traders. At a later date, Mill, the historian of British India, was still an advocate of non-interference with normal trade channels except under special circumstances. ‘Direct measures,’ he says, ‘at the cost of the State to procure food from a distance are expedient when, for some peculiar reason, the thing is not likely to be done by private speculation. In any other case, they are a great error. Private traders will not, in such cases, venture to compete with the Government, and though a Government can do much more than one merchant, it cannot do nearly as much as all merchants.’ This controversy has not been completely settled even now, and echoes of it were heard in India during the Second World War, when famine conditions approached. In 1807 the dispute went on so long that by the time the Government had decided to import grain cattle had perished in large numbers and transport was thus not available.

The second important feature of this famine was that the Company’s servants first realised the tendency of the stricken people to flock into towns. This tendency gave the authorities considerable anxiety in later years, because it not only cut across all organised rural schemes for relief but tended also to make the urban food supply problem extremely difficult. The tendency continues to this day, and in 1943 the streets of Calcutta were besieged by many thousands of villagers who had flocked into the city in the vague hope of finding relief. No attempt is made in this book to give the complete history of famines in British India—we are concerned only to show how thought and organisation in this matter developed. We may therefore pass by the Guntur famine of 1832, when failure of Government to appreciate the situation led to a heavy mortality, and mention briefly the severe famine of 1837 in upper India. Warned by its mistake in 1833, the Government looked ahead at an early stage and laid down principles of action. It was decided that the Government must offer employment at low rates of pay but without limit of numbers to all who would work; while the relief of those who could not work must be left mainly to private charity. Remission of land revenue was given on a generous scale, but loans and advances were kept down to a minimum, as it was felt ‘they led people to rely too little upon themselves’. The stern moralist theories which inspired the English Poor Law at that time necessarily governed policy in British India. Unfortunately, application, even of the agreed principles, was not very efficient.

After the Mutiny the great development of railways, irrigation and trade materially affected the famine problem, but the new administration was severely tested by the famines of 1860 and 1866. Official reports show that the 1860 famine was comparable in intensity with that of 1837, but its maximum effects were limited to an area containing about five and a half million people between Delhi and Agra, while crops in the surrounding areas were, on the whole, good. This provided the ideal opportunity of demonstrating how big a part railways could play in famine relief. The East Indian railways, then still under construction, made possible the import of large quantities of grain, though strict free-trade principles were followed in the matter of supply. The division of responsibility between the Government and the public, which had been adopted in 1837, was still followed, but ten large government relief works and many smaller local works were opened, on which about thirty-five thousand people were employed daily. Gratuitous relief was financed mainly by public charity which took the form of cooked food, supplemented by home relief after thorough enquiry where really necessary. The principles established during this famine provided the foundations of future development—a process which was facilitated by the appointment of Colonel Baird to study and report on the famine.

The next great test—the Orissa famine of 1866—found the administration wanting. Orissa had been free from any major famines for a long time and the local officials were caught unawares. The Bengal Government, in spite of greater experience, equally failed to read the signs of the times, and exports of grain on a heavy scale were allowed in the early months of 1866. Writing of this period, George Campbell, who subsequently presided over the committee to enquire into the famine, reported that ‘in April 1866 the magistrate of Cuttack still reported that there was no ground for serious apprehension. A few days later, in May, he and his followers were almost starved’. Orissa at that time was not accessible by rail, and its only road, which crossed several great rivers, was impassable in the rains. By the time the Bengal Government had realised what was happening, which was only when gaols and the Government establishments could not obtain supplies of rice, the monsoon had broken and Orissa was, for all practical purposes, cut off from the outside world. When the monsoon ceased, relief was given at great cost, but by then nearly a third of the population had perished.

These happenings in Orissa shocked the British public and the Government of India alike. The idea that the relief of the infirm and helpless must be left to private charity was abandoned, and it was laid down as a first principle that no loss of life must take place as a result of famine. This was an impossible target, but it was rightly interpreted to mean that the Government must accept full responsibility for all measures of famine relief. This led to extravagance in the famine of 1874, when seven thousand relieving officers were appointed to deal with a famine which a Committee of Enquiry considered to have been desperate in two districts only.

In the Madras-Bombay famine of 1877 fresh basic principles were laid down. The Government held that ‘the task of saving life irrespective of cost was one beyond their power to undertake . . . but rules of action . . . would enable them in the future to provide efficient assistance to the suffering people without incurring disastrous expenditure’. The instructions also said that ‘everyone admits the evils of indiscriminate private charity but the indiscriminate charity of a government is far worse . . . Government could not attempt the task of preventing all suffering and giving general relief to the poorer classes of the community’.

Enough experience had now been gained to make it possible for the period of vacillation to be brought to an end. The Famine Commission, under General Sir William Strachey, laid down general principles of famine relief, and in 1883 these formed the basis of the Famine Code. That Code has undergone certain modifications since then, but the principles enunciated in it, and in the Commission’s report, have governed all famine relief from that time, and have, in the main, justified themselves by results.

It is not necessary for our purpose to study the provisions of the Famine Code in detail. It is sufficient to know that at last, after many disastrous mistakes, a practical set of principles had emerged. The burden of their implementation was to fall mainly upon the District Officer, and it is perhaps in famine assistance that the Indian Civil Service was seen at its best. The devotion to duty and the British energy which most officers of that service displayed in their work were essential to the operation of famine relief; but they would not have availed without the careful formulation of principles by the Famine Commission, afterwards expressed in the Famine Code. The main principles were four in number.

(1) The first was that in time of actual or prospective famine the state must provide work for all able-bodied persons, since at such a time the power of the land-owning classes to employ labour is reduced, while at the same time prices rise. The relief work must be offered promptly before the labourers’ strength is exhausted; it must not be so light or so attractive as to induce any who are not really in want to undertake it, but, on the other hand, allowance must be made for the fact that many will be doing unaccustomed work while ‘many may be physically and morally depressed’. It was pointed out that, in addition to providing relief, attendance at such work will afford a reliable indication as to the extent of the distress.

(2) The Government must accept the obligation of relieving persons other than able-bodied; while the voluntary aid of independent persons might be utilised, government officers must be mainly responsible for administering this aid. It should, wherever possible, take the form of doles of grain in the homes of the needy after a careful scrutiny of the lists by government officers, but this would need to be supplemented by relief houses at which meals and perhaps residence would be provided.

(3) In general the supply and distribution of food should be left to private trade, though in purely agricultural tracts, where there are no normal imports, government intervention might be necessary.

(4) Suspension of collection of revenue and rent should be granted, but only when it becomes certain that it cannot be collected without undue pressure.

Each province has its own famine code, in which these principles are translated in great detail into practical terms; and since 1880, on the appearance of famine conditions, every officer of the Government has known what he has had to do. The system was put to a severe test by the great famine of 1897 when drought affected an area of 225,000 square miles and a population of 62,000,000. On the whole it worked well and the commission which subsequently enquired into the whole matter found that ‘the success actually attained in the relief of distress and the saving of human life was, if not complete, far greater than any that has been recorded in famines that are at all comparable with it in extent, severity or duration’.

Fundamentally the system depended on good communications, an efficient bureaucracy and all-India control, and it is interesting to note that the first major breakdown occurred in 1943, when, thanks to war conditions and political developments, none of these conditions obtained. Discussion of that breakdown is outside our present scope.

Chapter XX

The Growth of the Services

One of the most important factors in the administrative impact of Britain on India has been the development, first of the imperial and then of the provincial services. India has been equipped with a highly trained, professional Civil Service, characterised in the main by integrity and diligence, founded originally on the principle that everything must be under European supervision, but gradually Indianised, even in the higher ranks, as self-government approached. In this chapter we shall briefly trace the process by which the services came into being and grew. Naturally we shall begin with the I.C.S., which not only to a great extent ruled India in the nineteenth century but also set the tone for the other services.

In its very early days the Government passed a resolution ‘not to employ any gentleman in a place of charge’, and the Company’s service became the preserve of the middle classes. There was, indeed, at that time nothing about it to attract the nobility. The pay was poor, conditions of life were uncomfortable and mortality was heavy. In Bombay, we are told that recruits died as fast as they came; and according to O’Malley it was a common saying that ‘the average life of a man in Bombay was two monsoons’. Apprentices began at £5 a year, and after seven years’ service might become writers at a salary which varied somewhat from time to time, but was seldom more than £20 a year, of which half would be drawn in England. If they were diligent and successful they might hope to become senior merchants on the princely salary of £50, but it was just as likely that they would die before reaching such dizzy heights. Their work was varied, and, indeed, like their successors in the I.C.S., they had to be ‘jacks-of-all-trades’. In addition to buying and selling, they carried on municipal affairs in the Presidencies, they managed the Company’s zemindaris, they tried civil and criminal cases within the Settlements and they were expected to be sufficiently good amateur soldiers to take a hand in any war that might spring up.

Love of adventure might have continued to tempt some young men to a life of so much variety and so little profit, but before long the Company’s servants discovered the possibilities of private trade and began to grow rich. The Service then became attractive, and the English aristocracy became interested in it. Governors-General were seriously embarrassed by requests from highly placed personages at home, including even royalty, to find lucrative posts for their protégés, and every such appointment necessarily meant that somebody in the service who considered he had a claim to it was aggrieved. As long as the Company’s servants were left free to make private fortunes they might be expected to put up with these interlopers, but, as we have seen, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century new standards of integrity were laid down and enforced. Persons engaged in judicial or revenue work as distinct from mercantile activities were prohibited from taking part in private trade and a pledge so to abstain was included in the covenant which was signed by every European servant of the Company in India. Some countervailing advantage was required.

In 1793 the Charter Act laid down that all ordinary vacancies in the Company’s service must be filled by those already in the service, in order of seniority. This provision may be regarded either as a protection for the Governor-General against embarrassing outside pressure or as a guarantee of the rights of the Company’s servants. In this latter aspect it formed one element in the Cornwallis plan of building up an honest administration—the other element being the payment of adequate salaries. Cornwallis may be criticised for his refusal to employ Indians in high responsible office, but it must be admitted that he changed the character of the Company’s service and established the later tradition of proud integrity. The provision that seniority should govern promotion was not abrogated until 1861, and even then it continued in practice to count for a great deal. In modern times governments have been reluctant to supersede even officers generally regarded as below average; and though this may at times have given undue protection to inefficiency, it did at least discourage place-seeking and encourage fearlessness and independence of thought.

As Cornwallis changed the character of the Civil Service, so Wellesley, by his foundation of an Indian Empire, changed its scope. Its members were not now traders but administrators and proconsuls. The previous division of the Service into mercantile and administrative branches required further amplification, but the dividing lines established between revenue, judicial and administrative functions were for a time blurred by the frequent changes in district organisation, which have already been described.

These new responsibilities clearly required not only greater knowledge of Indian languages and customs but also a better education than most of the Company’s servants had possessed, and Wellesley, shocked at what he described as the ‘loose and irregular system’ of training, founded Fort William College. The Home authorities, who were at this time a little irritated with Wellesley’s independence of action, whittled this down to a language school, but in 1806 they themselves founded Haileybury College ‘to provide a supply of persons duly qualified to discharge the various and important duties required from the civil servants of the company’.

Admission was by nomination, which lay in the hands of the Directors and the Board of Control. This system continued until, in 1853, the last Charter Act established the principle of open competition for which Macaulay had fought twenty years earlier. Opinion has always differed as to the merits of this system. There are those who say that it puts a premium on merely academic ability and ignores or minimises factors such as personality and initiative which are of vital importance in administration. The supporters of the system reply that it is at least as likely to furnish those qualities as the patronage which preceded it and that in the nineteenth century it succeeded in attracting to the I.C.S. a considerable proportion of the ablest men from the older universities. The balance of opinion is perhaps that it worked reasonably well because it was applied to a class which, by training and background, was likely to possess the personal qualities most required, but that it would not necessarily apply equally well to the selection of Indians. In their case many experienced administrators would prefer a system of selection based on interview and record. Be this as it may, the open competition has conditioned the I.C.S. for nearly a hundred years and it has at least guaranteed high intellectual standards.

The exclusion of ‘outsiders’ from civil-service appointments applied only to the older provinces. These were known as Regulation Provinces because the Governor-Generals’ Acts which applied to them were until 1834 styled ‘Regulations’. As new and less developed provinces came under the Company’s rule, it was felt that an elaborate system of written law, based to some extent on English practice, was not suitable. This was particularly the case where primitive and aboriginal peoples were concerned. There had, moreover, been some reaction against the Cornwallis’ ‘anglicising’ tendency. In new provinces, therefore, the general body of the Regulations was not applied. Certain main principles were laid down and officials were left to act on them as seemed best and without the limitation of written law. Posts in the new or Non-Regulation Provinces had not been included in the schedule of appointments reserved for the Companies Covenanted Service, and military men were thus eligible for employment in them. Even in the Regulation Provinces it had not been possible to observe the rule in this matter, and excellent work had been done in Madras, for example, by such army officers as Munro and Read. The employment of soldiers was particularly indicated in provinces where semi-military activities such as suppression of rebels or robber bands had to go side by side with administration, and in the Punjab and elsewhere mixed civil and military administrations were thus built up. This was naturally resented by the civilians at the time, but it was undoubtedly a wise move, and the military element had an excellent effect on the tone of the administration; indeed, it would hardly be too much to say that the Punjab Commission, formed in this way, was perhaps the finest corps of administrators that India has ever known. The basic principles defined for it by John Lawrence, himself a civilian, were simplicity of rules, respect for Indian customs, small districts and the concentration of all authority in the person of the Deputy Commissioner. Henry Lawrence, the soldier, perhaps brought a more human touch to the Punjab; but though the brothers seriously disagreed over at least one major aspect of policy, the partnership symbolised the value of the mixed military and civilian administration. The appointment of non-civilians to all provinces was legalised in 1861, but shortly thereafter the more settled condition of the country led naturally to a more, uniform regulation procedure, and except in Burma and the N.W.F.P. all administrative posts came into the hands of the civilian.

The I.C.S. had now been organised on principles which provided a reasonable guarantee that it would be characterised by integrity and ability. One serious defect was that it was entirely European and that Indians were completely cut off from any but subordinate administrative posts.

The Charter Act of 1833 had laid down that ‘no subject of Her Majesty should, by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour or any of them be disabled from holding any place, office or employment under the Company’. Again in 1858 this principle was reaffirmed. There were, however, in the Queen’s Proclamation the qualifying words that the officers must be those ‘the duties of which, they may be qualified by their education, ability and integrity to discharge’. For a time this was interpreted to mean merely that no obstacle would be put in the way of an Indian who chose to journey to England and sit in the open competition for the I.C.S. In practice the difficulties in the way of his doing so were almost insuperable. They have been graphically depicted by Sir Surendranath Banerjea in A Nation in the Making: ‘I started for England on March 3, 1868 with Romesh Chunder Dutt and Behari Lal Gupta. We were all young, in our teens, and a visit to England in those days was a more serious affair than it is now. It not only meant absence from home and those near and dear to one for a number of years, but there was the grim prospect of social ostracism, which for all practical purposes has now happily passed away. We all three had to make our own arrangements in secret, as if we were engaged in some nefarious plot of which the world should know nothing.’

One Indian passed into the Service in 1864 and three in 1869. The system of selection solely by open competition in England had in effect made it more difficult than before for Indians to enter the Service. This was emphasised in the parliamentary debates of 1867, and ten years later, though it was decided not to interfere with the system of recruitment to the I.C.S., another avenue of approach to superior administrative posts for Indians was provided. A new service, known as the Statutory Civil Service, was established. Only Indians were to be eligible for it, and one-sixth of the posts formerly held by the I.C.S. were to be filled from this Service. The system did not work well, chiefly because the Statutory Civil Service was regarded as an inferior substitute for the I.C.S. It did not therefore attract the right class of candidate, and at a later date its existence was resented by senior members of the uncovenanted services. It was abolished a few years later, after only sixty-nine persons had been appointed to it. A better approach to a solution was found by the Public Services Commission under the chairmanship of Sir Charles Aitchison, appointed in 1886. As a result of the report of this Commission, the uncovenanted services were reorganised, though no change was made in methods of recruitment to the I.C.S. Two new services—the Provincial Civil Service and a Subordinate Civil Service—were established, and from these services were filled the more important posts below those held by the I.C.S. To put this in a more concrete form: the District Magistrate would usually be an Indian Civil Servant, but most of his principal officers would be members of the Provincial Service, a somewhat similar arrangement being made in the judicial line. Clearly the mere provision of posts subordinate to those held by the I.C.S. could not meet the demand for the admission of Indians to the higher branches of administration. It was accordingly laid down that a certain proportion of the posts previously reserved for the I.C.S.—to be known as ‘listed’ posts—should be reserved for men from the Provincial Service.

In one sense this scheme was successful. It secured the recruitment of men of good class and ability for important posts such as those of Deputy Magistrates and Sub-Divisional Officers, and it did enable a certain number of Indians to become District Magistrates or Deputy Commissioners. Indians who achieved that rank nevertheless felt rather out in the cold. They were not members of the ‘heaven-born’ I.C.S and, moreover, few of them reached this position until they were too old to be of great practical use. It did not make up for the fewness of Indian members of the I.C.S. It may be noted in passing that in 1889, after the report of the Aitchison Commission, the covenanted Civil Service ceased to be known as ‘Bengal Civil Service’, ‘Madras Civil Service ‘ or the like, and was officially designated the ‘Civil Service in India’, a title which has seldom been used in practice.

By the time these changes took place there was a strong Indian demand that examinations for the I.C.S. should be held in India simultaneously with those in England. Nothing less than this, it was felt, would secure the admission to the Service of adequate numbers of Indians. No action was taken in the direction of simultaneous examinations until 1922; results then followed rapidly, and by 1935 nearly one-third of the members of the I.C.S. were Indian.

It is easy to criticise the British Government for dilatoriness in the matter of Indianisation. They frankly regarded that process as of very secondary importance compared with sound administration. They held, in the words of the Court of Directors in their despatch forwarding the Charter Act of 1833, that ‘we must guard against the supposition that it is chiefly by holding out means and opportunity of official distinction that we expect our Government to benefit the millions subject to our authority. . . . Opportunities of official advancement can little benefit the bulk of the people under any Government . . . it is not by holding out incentives to official ambition but by repressing crime, by securing and guarding property, by creating confidence, by ensuring to industry the fruit of its labour, by protecting men in the undisturbed enjoyment of their rights and in the unfettered exercise of their faculties, that Governments best minister to the public wealth and happiness. In effect the free access to office is chiefly valuable when it is part of general freedom’.

Many Indians today resent the assumption that in the nineteenth century these considerations necessarily excluded their forefathers from high administrative posts. In view, however, of the deplorable state of Indian education at that time and of the almost universal corruption which had characterised the late Mughal Empire, the Government of India were perhaps justified in their hesitation. Complete integrity in administration was a new thing, even in England, but by the middle of the nineteenth century it had there taken very firm root. Young Englishmen from the universities would inevitably bring to India a new tradition of incorruptibility and provided they were in an overwhelming majority, their spirit would permeate the services and give Indian administration a fresh start. It would be difficult to assert that for such a process three generations was too long a period. It is perhaps on account of the slow pace of Indianisation, that as Indians came into the I.C.S. they, too, absorbed and became proud of its spirit and tradition and that when independence was achieved they were fully ready for the tasks ahead. That readiness may well be regarded as one of Britain’s signal successes in India.

The development of the Imperial Police Service took place much later than that of the I.C.S. During the time of the East India Company the police administration was little more than an adaptation of the rather inefficient Mughal machinery and the great work done in suppressing dacoity, thugee and other prevalent crimes was the result, not of scientific administration, but of relentless determination on the part of a few individuals. Under Mughal rule it was the duty of the zemindar to apprehend criminals and to restore or make good the value of stolen property. He was assisted by the principle that the village was responsible for crimes committed within its boundaries, unless and until it produced the offender or tracked him down to another village. Under the zemindar the village headman had a similar responsibility, which was often rigorously and even cruelly enforced and in its discharge he had the assistance of village watchmen, who were required to keep watch at night, to report all strangers and to know who were the suspicious characters in their villages. Much reliance was also placed upon the system of mutual pledges of security. ‘One house shall become security for another; so that they shall all be reciprocally pledged and bound each for the other’.⁷ Bad characters, who naturally could find no neighbour willing to undertake this liability, were segregated in a particular quarter of the village.

The system seldom worked well, largely because village headmen and watchmen were themselves often in league with the principal criminals; but it broke down altogether when the Central Government grew feeble and people had more reason to fear the criminals than to respect the forces of law and order.

When the British succeeded to power they retained the system of village responsibility and village watchmen, but relieved the zemindars of their duties. The magistrates became responsible for law and order, and for this purpose had a small staff of darogas, or subordinate police officers, assisted by peons. Darogas were paid by results—so much for a conviction. The new system worked rather worse than the old. The zemindar, in those provinces where he existed, had been in a better position than the magistrate to know what was going on in the villages, and his disappearance from the chain of responsibility was unfortunate. At the same time the comparative mildness of the English law and the insistence on Western standards of evidence emboldened criminals. The authors of the Report of the Indian Police Commission of 1902 pertinently quote Elphinstone in this context: ‘Though the natives put up with petty disorders, they checked great ones with a rough hand and gave themselves no concern about the attendant evils; if robberies were committed, they seized all the suspicious characters in the neighbourhood, and if they succeeded in restoring quiet they did not care though a hundred Ramoosees suffered imprisonment or torture without a fault. Such a course would not be thought of under our Government; but we must consider how far our abstaining from such tyranny must weaken us and must provide a remedy in some more suitable shape.’

In some respects, then, well-meaning British intervention perhaps made matters worse rather than better in the first place. In 1813 the Court of Directors, which had for some time been dissatisfied with the police administration, appointed a Special Committee of Enquiry. The Committee recommended a reduction in the number of darogas, who were regarded as ineffective and corrupt, and a greater reliance on the village police.

These recommendations were implemented in Madras in 1816. The main police duties were again assigned to hereditary village watchmen who, together with the headmen, were to work under Tahsildars or Magistrate-Collectors. A similar system was adopted in Bombay in 1827, and here as in Madras the subordinate revenue officers were also to be employed on police duties. In Bengal the power of the daroga was further limited, but little was done to strengthen the organisation of village watchmen. One important Bengal innovation was the appointment in 1808 of a Superintendent of Police for the divisions of Calcutta, Dacca, and Murshidabad, who was to be particularly concerned with action against dacoity. This was a valuable step forward, for now for the first time in British rule one officer was free to concentrate solely on the suppression of crime. He made frequent use of spies, informers and agents and achieved a great deal of success in suppressing dacoity. The post was unfortunately abolished in 1829 and its duties transferred to the newly appointed Divisional Commissioner of Bengal. Once again there was no senior officer concerned solely with the prevention and detection of crime, and police administration soon deteriorated. This was made very clear in the report of the Select Committee appointed in 1832 to examine the affairs of the East India Company.

Little action was taken on this report for some years. In 1853, thanks partly to a successful experiment in Sindh after its annexation, the Bombay Government appointed Superintendents of Police in all districts, under the general control of the District Magistrates. This step may be regarded as the foundation of proper police administration in India, and in 1855 it was followed by the appointment of a Commissioner of Police, responsible for police administration throughout the Bombay Presidency. Similar measures were taken in Madras in 1859. In 1860 the Government of India appointed a Commission on Police Administration in India and in effect it recommended the adoption in all provinces of the Bombay system. Its recommendations were implemented in Act V of 1861 and in principle the system has remained unchanged since that time. The District Magistrate is ultimately responsible for law and order, and the Superintendent of Police therefore works in what is described in Bengal as ‘subordinate alliance’ with the District Magistrate.

On the whole the system worked well, but the Indian Police Commission of 1902 commented that ‘The extent to which the village police must co-operate with the regular police has been lost sight of, and an attempt has almost everywhere been made to do all the police work through the officers of the department; the importance of police work has been underestimated, and responsible duties have ordinarily been entrusted to untrained and ill-educated officers recruited in the lowest ranks from the lower strata of society; that supervision has been defective owing to the failure to appoint even the staff contemplated by the law and to increase that staff with the growing necessities of administration; that superior officers of the department have been insufficiently trained and have been allowed from various causes to get out of acquaintance and sympathy with the people and out of touch even with their own subordinates; and that their sense of responsibility has been weakened by a degree of interference never contemplated by the authors of the system’.

These defects were the result not of faults in the system laid down in 1860 but of the failure to establish a properly trained and recruited superior police service to carry out that system. In the period immediately following the Act of 1861 Superintendents of Police were as a rule army officers. The military authorities soon objected to this system; thereafter for a time there was no satisfactory source of recruitment. Nominations were given to such Europeans as could be found in India, no Indians being taken for the higher ranks. In 1893 open competition was established in England as the main method of recruitment, but it was open only to Europeans. A certain number of posts were however filled in India, and a few Indians were appointed as Superintendents of Police. Those Indians were, in nearly all cases, promoted from subordinate police posts. They did not as a rule justify their promotion and the Service became opposed to further appointments of Indians as Superintendents.

The Indian Police Commission of 1902 did not accept the service view on this matter. They pointed out the satisfactory results of introducing a Provincial Service in the general administration and stated that ‘many Magistrates and Collectors have spoken in strong terms of the enormous advantages that must accrue to a Superintendent from having the assistance of such an officer as some of their native subordinates, and of the probability that selected officers from among that class might prove fully qualified for the charge of the police of a district’. They went on to state that ‘it is more than desirable—it is incumbent on the Government—to use native agency to the utmost extent possible without seriously impairing the efficiency of the service’. The employment of natives as Superintendents was ‘an experiment of a hopeful character’ which must be tried within reasonable limits. A beginning was to be made at once in every province, except the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province.

A very interesting controversy took place within the Commission as to how Indians should be selected for a certain number of posts of Superintendents. The Indian member of the Commission argued strongly that ‘the superior officers of the police—both European and native—should be recruited by one examination . . . and that there should be open competition both in England and in India, without distinction of race’. The Commission rejected this view. They held, in the first place, that there must always be ‘a certain proportion of Superintendents enlisted from among Europeans trained in Europe’, and that such men would be best secured by examination in England. They did not, however, consider open competition in England a good way of choosing Indians. ‘The best native is not necessarily the man who has, as a boy, been sent away from all his home associations to England for education; and . . . a Native police officer is not the better for having lost touch with his people.’

The Report of the Commission led in 1905 to the establishment of an Indian Police Service and a Provincial Police Service. The Indian Police Service, from which most of the posts of Superintendents were to be filled, was to be recruited by open competition in England, limited to British subjects of European birth, and the age limit was so fixed as to attract boys from the public schools rather than men from the universities.

The Provincial Police Service which was now established was to provide a class of Deputy Superintendents whose normal functions would be to serve as subordinates of Superintendents but some of whom might be selected as Superintendents themselves. The system thus established continued until the whole outlook on the question of the employment of Indians was changed by political developments.

It is not possible in this work to discuss in detail the development of the other services, but brief reference must be made to two services which have played a vital part in India’s progress—the Indian Medical Service and the Public Works Department.

As soon as the East India Company established ‘factories’ in India, it naturally had to send out chirurgeons for the medical care of its servants while at the same time surgeons had to be provided on the Company’s ships. As the military strength of the Company grew, a fresh obligation to provide medical facilities arose, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the Company employed a considerable number of practitioners. In 1764 they were organised into a service known as the Indian Medical Service, and in 1766 that service was divided into a military and a civil branch. In 1784 the civil branch was placed under a Hospital Board, but the military branch still had a prior claim on the services of the civil doctors who soon came to be known, first as Zillah⁸ Surgeons and later as Civil Surgeons. Although from an early date Indians were eligible for this service, it continued in practice to be mainly European.

Early in the present century Lord Morley put forward a scheme by which many posts held by members of the Indian Medical Service would be transferred to ‘independent medical practitioners recruited in India’. Lord Morley’s primary object was to encourage able young Indians to take to medicine as a profession but the Governor-General criticised this scheme on the grounds that ‘the mere transfer of a certain number of Government appointments from the Indian Medical Service to private practitioners would not materially encourage the growth of an independent medical profession; that most of the civil appointments then held by the Indian Medical Service could not suitably be given to men not in regular government service with whom private practice would necessarily be the first consideration; and that the retention of a considerable number of superior medical appointments for the Indian Medical Service was essential not only in the interests of administrative efficiency but also for the purpose of making the service itself attractive to able medical men’.

The scheme was dropped, but the fact that it had been mooted made the Indian Medical Service less attractive and recruitment began to be difficult. From this time onwards the Indian demand for the general Indianisation of the services grew strong and could not be ignored by a British Government which professed a liberal policy with regard to the share to be taken by Indians in their own government. Early in the second quarter of this century provincial medical services were established from which most medical posts under the Provincial Governments were to be filled. The number of members of the Indian Medical Service employed in provinces was to be restricted to what was required to provide a reserve for the Army and to supply European medical attention for the European services. In spite of its great traditions and its remarkable services to India, the Civil Branch of the Indian Medical Service attracted considerable hostility from Indian politicians. Its very existence was regarded as a stigma on the Indian medical profession; and the fact that many Europeans at that time were prejudiced against Indian medical attention, particularly for their families, exacerbated Indian feeling on this subject.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the Government of India had begun to embark on a great programme of opening up communications, and it was obvious that for this purpose highly trained engineers would be required. For this purpose engineering colleges were opened at Rurki, Poona and later Madras. Up till 1870 the Public Works Department was recruited largely from the Royal Engineers, but a certain number of Englishmen were appointed by competitive examination in England while other men were taken in from the engineering colleges in India. In 1871 the Royal Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill was set up for the express purpose of training civil engineers for the Indian Public Works Department. Officers of the Royal Engineers continued to be seconded to the Public Works Department, but all other European recruitment was through Cooper’s Hill, which rapidly built up a fine tradition and for the next thirty years played a great part in the development of India. A further step was taken in 1876 when the Secretary of State decided that the Indian engineering colleges ‘might be regarded as particularly intended for natives of India’. The Public Service Commission of 1886 examined this whole question and found that the system was somewhat top heavy in the sense that highly trained engineers recruited from England were being employed in work for which subordinates with less training would be adequate. The comments of the Commission on the whole subject are of interest: ‘The Government of India holds that in the Buildings and Roads Branch where works have already been constructed, highly trained Engineers are not requisite, and the policy of the Government is to make over such works to local boards who employ for their maintenance Engineers appointed by themselves who are not generally superior to the best of the Upper Subordinate class. The constitution of the Department and the scale on which it is recruited, however, offer great obstacles to the full development of this policy. . . . The Engineers are on the hands of the Government and must be employed. Men recruited in India, once in the Department, are paid at the rates considered necessary for men who have received a superior general and professional education in England, and these last find themselves for many years condemned to labour on works within the capacity of men of an inferior standard of education. The Commission is informed by one very competent witness that at present a Cooper’s Hill man is sometimes kept for fifteen years manufacturing bricks and lime and putting them together. Again, the distinctions inevitable in a Department so constituted and recruited give rise to friction and jealousies which must affect the efficiency of its officers. . . . The evidence before the Commission leaves no ground for doubting that the officers recruited in England receive at Woolwich, Chatham, and Cooper’s Hill a professional education of a higher standard than that which the best Indian Engineering Colleges are capable of affording. . . . but it is abundantly evident that at least one of the Indian Engineering Colleges can, and does impart such a professional education as is fully adequate for the ordinary work of the Department. . . .’ This reasoning naturally led to the division of the Public Works Department into an imperial service, recruited from the Royal Engineers and from Cooper’s Hill, and provincial services, recruited from the Indian engineering colleges. In 1906 Cooper’s Hill was abolished as other sources of British recruitment were available, but the distinction between the imperial and the provincial services in this and certain other departments remained a permanent feature of the administration.

We have seen that in the second half of the nineteenth century India was furnished in all important departments of state with highly organised and trained services, fully geared to the growing complexities of administration. There can be little doubt that they represented a new level of efficiency and even their sternest critics would admit that they established standards of integrity hitherto unknown in India. With these virtues, however, went a certain aloofness and an unconcealed consciousness of superiority which educated Indians found galling. Thompson and Garratt in The Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India aptly illustrate this attitude by two quotations. The first is attributed to Lord Roberts: ‘It is this consciousness of the inherent superiority of the European which has won for us India. However well educated and clever a native may be, and however brave he may have proved himself, I believe that no rank which we can bestow upon him would cause him to be considered as an equal by the British officer.’ The second quotation is from a speech of Mr. Seton-Karr, at one time Foreign Secretary to the Government of India. He spoke of ‘the cherished conviction which was shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter’s assistant in his lonely bungalow and by the editor in the full light of the Presidency town—from these to the Chief Commissioner in charge of an important province and to the Viceroy on his throne—the conviction in every man that he belongs to a race whom God has destined to govern and subdue’.

This attitude of conscious superiority must not be thought of as vice peculiar to those Englishmen who went to India; it was rather the natural outcome of the mid-Victorian outlook. The principle of relativity had not then undermined the strength of Englishmen’s convictions or filled them with doubt as to the universal validity of their own beliefs and standards. An earlier generation of Englishmen in India had indeed been prepared to accept Indian standards of value for India, perhaps because they cared little about standards at all; but the men who built British India in the middle of the nineteenth century were, in the main, stern moralists full of the earnestness of the mid-Victorian age. They had no doubt that Christianity was superior to all other religions and that the European way of life was better than that of India. They believed, in all sincerity, that it was their mission to lead India towards English ways of thought and feeling—though this might have to be done gradually in order not to precipitate another mutiny.

A small community living and ruling in a foreign country has perhaps two choices open to it. It can hold aloof and preserve its own standards, or it can mingle freely and allow its beliefs and philosophy to be diluted by those of the majority. If Anglicisation was the right policy for Britain to follow in India, it was probably necessary for Englishmen to keep to themselves until Indians were permeated by English ideas. Any approval or condemnation of the nineteenth century English aloofness in India must therefore be based on one’s own philosophy of life. It will be deplored by those who regard Indian and European culture and habits of thought as equally valuable, while it may be approved by those who believe in the superiority of Western civilisation. Pursuit of that fundamental question is beyond the scope of this chapter and perhaps of this book.

It is not for a moment suggested that these considerations were present in the minds of every aloof bureaucrat. More often, personal and national predilections were the decisive factors. Improved communications made it easier for Englishmen in India to continue to think of England as home; they also made it easier for them to marry English women and, as is the habit of the Englishman wherever he goes, to found little English colonies, focused round the club, all over India. At a later date the racial exclusiveness of these clubs—though quite defensible and indeed paralleled throughout the world—caused great resentment. Its chief effect in the early days was to make it more difficult for the English official to cultivate friendly relations with the educated Indian. Many did, nevertheless, break down this barrier, and the large number of nineteenth century civilians who became authorities on some aspect of Indian learning should be sufficient to dispel the idea that the services were not interested in things Indian. It is, however, in general true to say that the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, though efficient and devoted to the welfare of India, became a ruling caste outside the main current of Indian life and feeling.

Chapter XXI

The Restoration of Law and Order

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the East India Company had acquired dominion over a considerable part of India, and clearly the primary task of British officials was to establish law and order. Throughout vast areas security of life and property had long been absent, and in many cases the local representatives of Indian rulers either feared or were in league with the multitudinous bands of robbers and dacoits which infested the country. A journey was indeed a perilous undertaking and ‘travellers, particularly those with much property, seldom ventured to go from one place to another without being well escorted or in large parties’.

Disorder of this kind is normal in a time of political dissolution, but in India it was marked by one peculiar feature. This was the existence of bands of hereditary robbers and murderers, carrying out their crimes in a uniform manner and fortified in them by the grossest of superstitions. The existence of these associations of murderers called thugs, though known to the French traveller Tavernier in the seventeenth century, first came to the notice of the British after the capture of Seringapatam in 1799. About a hundred of them were then seized in the Mysore territories where they particularly flourished, and a few years later further arrests in the Arcot district led to the discovery that they were in fact hereditary robbers and murderers who operated in many parts of India and enjoyed the protection of petty chieftains and Zemindars in many places. It then soon appeared that they worked in gangs, that they confined their attention to travellers, that their customary method of murdering was by strangling and that their children were regularly trained in this nefarious profession. Unlike the highwayman of mediaeval European repute, they robbed the poor as well as the rich, and their readiness to commit murder for the sake of a few rupees is a striking testimony to their sense of security and the helplessness or indifference of the authorities.

Gangs often contained as many as three hundred men; but according to Colonel Sleeman, who more than any other man was responsible for their suppression, in such cases they worked as sub-gangs and only gathered as a body when necessary. Their general modus operandi has been graphically described by Thornton in his fascinating book Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs: ‘Some variations have existed in the man of perpetrating the murders; but the following seems to be the most general. While travelling along, one of the gang suddenly throws a rope or cloth round the neck of the devoted individual and retains hold of one end; the other end being seized by an accomplice. The instrument of death, crossed behind the neck, is then drawn very tight, the two Thugs who hold it pressing the head of the victim forwards; a third villain, who is in readiness behind the traveller, seizes him by the legs, and he is thus thrown on the ground. In this situation there is little opportunity of resistance. The operation of the noose is aided by kicks inflicted in the manner most likely to produce vital injury, and the sufferer is thus quickly despatched. . . . Such are the perseverance and caution of the Thugs, that, in the absence of a convenient opportunity, they have been known to travel in company with persons whom they have devoted to destruction, for several days before they executed their intention. If circumstances favour them, they generally commit the murder in a jungle, or an unfrequented part of the country, near a sandy place or dry watercourse. Particular tracts are chosen, in every part of India, where they may exercise their horrid profession with the greatest convenience and security. Much-frequented roads, passing through extensive jungles, where the ground is soft for the grave, or the jungle thick to cover them, and where the local authorities took no notice of the bodies, were favourite spots. The Thugs speak of such places with the same affection and enthusiasm as other men would of the most delightful scenes of their early life.’

Inside each band of thugs regular ranks and gradations existed as in any other organised society. A thug with a great reputation as a strangler, or whose ancestors had been thugs from time immemorial, or who could bribe or hoodwink the local officials, or who was a natural leader of men, would become a jamadar, while a still more outstanding member of the profession might be a subadar. The man of rank would naturally lead the more important expeditions and as leader would be entitled to a special share of the plunder. The normal rule of sharing was, at least in Southern India, that portions were first set aside for the local polygars or chieftains whose connivance was important; then something was provided for the extensive performance of religious ceremonies and for a kind of family pension fund. Thereafter two shares went to the leader, a share and a half to the actual murderer and a share to each ordinary member of the gang.

To Western readers it may seem incredible that a share of the plunder should have been set aside for religious ceremonies, but the evidence as to the important part played in the affairs of the thugs by superstitions and ceremonies is so strong as to be beyond doubt. Although many thugs were Muslims, thuggee was closely linked with the cult of the Hindu goddess Kali, to whom the victims were regarded as sacrifices and on whom the thugs relied for protection. The thugs traced their origin to the great encounter between the goddess and an all-devouring demon who threatened the newly created human race with extinction. From every drop of the demon’s blood, another demon arose, and when that demon in turn was cut down, the same process recurred. At length the goddess decided that the demons must be slain without loss of blood, and for this purpose she formed two men from her own perspiration and gave them a strip of cloth. With this they strangled the demons and were rewarded with the protection of the goddess and with the command to strangle men henceforth as they bad strangled the demons.

This gross superstition gave the thugs an extraordinary confidence. As long as they kept the rules and observed the omens, Kali would not desert them. Again and again the thugs who were caught by the British openly attributed their downfall to some slackness in their observances. One of them told Captain Sleeman: ‘That Davy (or Kali) instituted Thugee and supported it, as long as we attended to her omens and observed the rules framed by the wisdom of our ancestors, nothing can ever make us doubt.’ And this indeed was their general spirit.

Omens were of the highest importance, and before every expedition the auspices were taken in a most elaborate manner and with this invocation: ‘Great goddess! universal mother! if this, our meditated expedition be fitting in thy sight, vouchsafe us thy help, and the signs of thy approbation!’ Even after favourable auspices, subsequent ill-omens such as a sneeze or a woman with an empty pitcher, might compel them to abandon the expedition.

Amongst the thugs the pickaxe with which the victims’ grave was dug was an emblem of the highest importance. It was forged in secret, ceremonially washed four times, consecrated in a most elaborate priestly ceremony and thenceforth guarded with the utmost care. No omen was regarded as more sinister than the falling of the pickaxe from the hand of the favoured thug selected to carry it on a journey. Equal solemnity attached to the initiation of a novice to the art of strangling, which took place only after a long period of preparation. In brief, the whole cult and practice of thuggee was surrounded with all the superstitious ceremonies that imagination could devise.

As soon as the existence of thuggee was realised, energetic District Officers began to take action against it, and a good deal was done in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Something more than this unco-ordinated activity was required against such a widespread secret cult, and in 1829 the agent of the Governor-General in Narbada territories was instructed to take action against all thugs wherever they might be. Captain Sleeman, one of the outstanding men of the time, was appointed as the agent’s assistant for this specific work, and the Company’s officials throughout India were directed to send to him not only reports of all cases of thuggee but also all facts which might help to unearth the secrets of the thugs. The study of these reports, followed up by personal questioning of large numbers of thugs, threw much light on their methods, and ultimately made their suppression possible. The evil with which Sleeman had to cope had grown to a monstrous extent. In Mysore alone where thuggee was rampant in the first decade of the nineteenth century, hundreds of persons were murdered annually. Defending a statement that some individual thugs had been concerned in two hundred murders the magistrate of Chittoor said: ‘Nor will this estimate appear extravagant if it be remembered, that murder was their profession, frequently their only means of gaining a subsistence; every man of fifty years of age has probably been actively engaged during twenty-five years of his life in murder; and, on the most moderate computation it may be reckoned that he has made one excursion a year, and met each time with ten victims.’

The prevalence of the crime can be most vividly realised from a study of Sleeman’s Report on the Thugs. The list of thugs still at large in 1840, after eleven years of vigorous action against them, occupies ninety pages of print, while his map of the small province of Oudh shows two hundred and fifty-four graves prepared by thugs in advance of their expedition.

There were four main difficulties in the way of successful operations. The first of these arose from the very nature of the crime and was well described by one of the officers who was most zealous in its suppression. The magistrate of Chittoor, already quoted, wrote thus: ‘It is only necessary to consider the habits of the phansigors⁹ to be convinced of the extreme difficulty of discovering and convicting them and how inadequate the ordinary measures of state and the operation of the present laws are for effecting those objects. The scene of their crimes is always out of their own districts, seldom within thirty miles of their usual places of abode; they have sometimes left their homes for several months together and faced journeys of many hundreds of miles. Their victims are generally travellers with whose circumstances they become acquainted at public choultries; they frequently change their name and sometimes go by several names, the latter to prevent detection; murder their victims at a distance from towns or large villages, in public roads leading through jungles or uncultivated land, in which they bury their bodies; they sometimes take with them some of their children (boys under twelve years of age) the less to attract notice and suspicion. The headman of the gang sometimes rides on a horse; they generally have with them some bullocks or tattoo ponies to carry the plundered property; by these means they normally pass for merchants, the character they frequently assume. A gang is always sufficiently numerous to allow several persons belonging to it being stationed at a short distance from the places where their victims are put to death, to give alarm in the case of approaching danger. They never commit robbery unaccompanied with murder; they first strangle their victims and then plunder them.’

A second difficulty was found in the general connivance and the cooperation extended by many chieftains, zemindars and officials to these criminals. This is brought out clearly in the correspondence of some of the officials of the time.

Stockwell, writing as joint magistrate of Etawah, stated that ‘it appears to me that the thugs formerly residing in Sindouse have settled in the Gwalior territories where they are sure of protection; at least as the Aumils of that country derive a revenue from their depredations it is fair to conclude that they protect them as formerly. I am told by the most respected of zemindars that Rs. 5,500 was the average payment made to these states for the thugs at the rate of twenty-five rupees per house, this being the number of 220 houses.’ This is made clearer still in the evidence of a thug approver, quoted by Thornton: ‘I am about 60 years of age; and am the son of that Laljoo who was confined for life in the Bareilly jail, for having been an accomplice in the murder of Lieutenant Mansell, near Murnae in A.D. 1812 when Mr. Halhed came down from Agra to arrest the Thugs. I have been asked to give a list of Thugs who paid tribute to the Gwalior State; and I have accordingly brought the latest list with me. It is dated Aghun Sumbut 1854 (Nov. A.D. 1797). Sheikh Mahommed Jumma, who was styled Colonel, was Aumil under the Gwalior State of the purgunahs in which the Thugs resided, viz. Pureehar, twelve villages, and Sursaudhur, fifty-two villages, at that time; and he sent for my father Laljoo and between them this list was made out. Each of the three hundred and eighteen houses were taxed at St. Rs. twenty-four and eight annas, and the agreement was to last three years. My father collected the tribute, which amounted yearly to St. Rs. seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-one; after the collections, he was allowed to deduct one hundred rupees for himself and fifty rupees for the two Putwaries; the remaining seven thousand six hundred and forty-one rupees he forwarded to the Aumil’s treasury. Whenever the thugs returned from an expedition, my father used to receive a present of one rupee from every house. The Sindouse Thugs were in the habit of making very long expeditions. They never returned in less than six months; if they were unsuccessful, they sometimes remained absent two years and on this account my father did not make a very large sum by the presents. . . . Into whatsoever hands the purgunahs of Pureehar and Susaee have fallen—viz., Nuwab Vizier, the Rana of Gohud, the Rohilla Chieftains, the Bhudoreea Rajah, the Rajah of Bhurtpore and the Gwalior State—from time immemorial has a tax of 24–8 on every house inhabited by the Thugs been levied and paid to the respective Aumils.’

Captain Sleeman’s comment on this is that it is not complete and that there were also other families in addition to the three hundred and eighteen who paid the tax on thuggee to the Aumils.

In a later letter Stockwell writes: ‘You would, perhaps, think it a shorter way to send one or two of the zemindars of this place, to recognise the Thugs of their own village; but, alas! the communication is still kept up; and they derive, perhaps, as much profit as ever from them.’ Sleeman, writing after a long experience of rural administration, tells us that ‘it is a common practice with Thanadars all over the country to connive at the residence within their jurisdiction of gangs of robbers, on the condition that they shall not rob within those limits, and shall give them a share of what they bring back from their expeditions’.

An approver, in a deposition before Captain Borthwick, one of Sleeman’s co-adjutors, stated that the thug leaders ‘keep up a direct understanding with the local authorities in Bundelcund, in whose limits they and their followers reside; and invariably, on their return from an excursion, conciliate their forbearance and favour by suitable Nuzzeranees’. Similar evidence exists with regard to the polygars or chieftains of Southern India, and, indeed, connivance by local rulers was perhaps the rule rather than the exception.

Matters were made more difficult by the fact that many thugs had alternative sources of livelihood and, indeed, carried on a Jekyll and Hyde existence, spending most of their time in a respectable occupation and practising thuggee occasionally. Thornton gives documentary evidence of a linen draper, dealing in a fairly large way in a cantonment, who ‘sometimes came with the gangs on Thuggee; and sometimes as a merchant, with cloths for sale’. The linen draper says: ‘Any skilful party might have had three or four “affairs” every night, without anyone being the wiser for it. People knew not what Thuggee was, nor what kind of people Thugs were. . . . I never invited a Thug to my house, nor did I ever expose any of the articles obtained in Thuggee for sale. I was much respected by the people of the town and the cantonments, and never suspected till arrested.’

A fourth difficulty arose from the new standards of proof demanded by the courts under English officials. In modern India it is notorious that the man who terrorises over a village can seldom be convicted of any specific crime—witnesses are too easily intimidated and public spirit is not as a rule strong enough to overcome fear. For this reason the present Criminal Procedure code still finds it necessary to allow people to be charged with being bad characters by reputation and to insist on their giving security for good behaviour. This was still more so in the early nineteenth century and particularly where murderers were concerned. Many persons, known by the people of the locality to be thugs, were acquitted for want of rigorous evidence and on more than one occasion an honest informer was himself punished because his case was not proved in a legal sense. The thugs, therefore, began to feel that the odds were in their favour.

To meet these difficulties two measures were adopted. In the first place, an Act was passed by which the mere fact of belonging to a gang of thugs was made an offence punishable with imprisonment for life. It was often possible to prove association where evidence of commission of a specific offence would not have been forthcoming. In the second place, Sleeman and his colleagues made skilful and discriminating use of approvers. A thug against whom the evidence was clear was pardoned after making a full confession—and such confessions not only led to conviction of particular thugs but also made the workings of the system plain. A procedure which allowed a thug to purchase his liberty at the expense of his colleagues in crime must have been profoundly distasteful to the authorities, but there was no other method available and it justified itself by results. In due course the various bands were broken up, the tradition died out, and in spite of isolated incidents thuggee as a system ceased to exist.

Another crime which gave the Company’s servants much anxiety was female infanticide. It might be thought that so unnatural a crime would seldom be found amongst civilised people; in fact, however, infanticide in one form or another has been practised by some of the most advanced races in the world, including the Phoenicians, the Chinese and the Greeks. In some cases it was sacrificial, in other cases economic, while in other cases eugenic considerations were paramount; but the fact remains that it is not an uncommon phenomena in history. In Western India, too, it was for long an important feature, though its form and purpose then differed somewhat from those reported elsewhere.

The East India Company’s servants knew at an early stage that in Bengal Hindu children were thrown into the sea as a sacrifice, though general Hindu sentiment deplored the practice. It was not, however, until 1789 that Jonathan Duncan, the Resident at Benares, discovered a widespread practice amongst certain Rajputs of murdering female children at birth. It arose from the simple fact that an unmarried daughter was a disgrace to her family and that it was often extremely difficult for a Rajput family to give a daughter in marriage. This difficulty was due in the first place to the narrow field of choice. Tod, the great authority on the Rajputs in the early nineteenth century, tells us that ‘although religion nowhere authorises this barbarity, the laws which regulate marriage among the Rajputs powerfully promote infanticide. Not only is inter-marriage prohibited between families of the same clan but between those of the same tribe; and though centuries may have intervened since their separation, and branches thus transplanted may have lost their original patronymic, they can never be re-grafted on the original stem: for instance, though eight centuries have separated the two grand sub-divisions of the Gehlotes, and the younger Seesodia, a marriage between any of the branches would be deemed incestuous: the Seesodia is yet brother to the Aharya, and regards every female of the race as his sister. Every tribe has, therefore, to look abroad, for a race distinct from its own, for suitors for the females. Foreign war, international feuds, or other calamities affect tribes the most remote from each other; nor can war or famine thin the clans of Marwar, without diminishing the female population of Amber: thus both suffer in a two fold degree. Many virtuous and humane princes have endeavoured to check or mitigate an evil, in the eradication of which every parental feeling would cooperate. Sumptuary edicts alone can control it; and the Rajputs were never sufficiently enamoured of despotism to permit it to rule within their private dwelling’.

The difficulty was magnified by the extravagant expenditure which Rajput conventions demanded on the occasion of a daughter’s marriage. Chieftains and landholders were constantly reminded by priests and bards of the munificence of their ancestors at marriage feasts and had held up to them the example of one who ‘emptied his coffers on the marriage of his daughter to Pirthiraj but he filled them with the praises of mankind’. One wise Rajput prince did indeed try to limit the dowry and the marriage expenditure to one year’s income of the bride’s father, but his people were not with him, and the Rajput’s have always been jealous of their household liberties. The birth of a daughter, always a liability among Hindus, was thus a double anxiety among the Rajputs, and, in the words of Tod, ‘the very silence with which a female birth is accompanied forcibly expresses sorrow’. It was from this circumstance that female infanticide sprang.

Jonathan Duncan was not the man to content himself with sending a report. He brought pressure to bear on the Rajputs and on 17th December 1789 they executed an agreement as follows. ‘Whereas it hath become known to the Government of the Honourable English East India Company, that we of the tribe of Rajkumars do not suffer our female children to live, and whereas this is a great crime . . . and whereas the British Government in India, whose subjects we are, have an utter detestation of such murderous practices, that we do ourselves acknowledge that, although customary among us, it is highly sinful, we do therefore hereby agree not to commit any longer such detestable acts; and any among us who (which God forbid) shall be hereafter guilty thereof, or shall not bring up and get our daughters married, to the best of our abilities, among those of our caste, shall be expelled from our tribe, and we shall neither eat nor keep society with such person or persons, without suffering hereafter the punishments denounced in the above purana and shastra’.

In 1795 infanticide was declared by Bengal Regulation XXI to be murder, and the regulation was extended to the new provinces in 1804. Neither the agreement nor the legislation seems to have made much difference to the practice. In 1804, when Duncan was Governor of Bombay, one of his officers reported of a certain princely family that ‘every female infant born in the Raja’s family, of a Rani or lawful wife, is immediately dropped into a hole dug in the earth and filled with milk, where it is drowned. . . . This custom of drowning female infants,’ continues the report, ‘is not peculiar to Kachh, but is common among the heads of the Khatri or Rajput tribes. . . . The expense, and difficulty of procuring suitable husbands, is the excuse usually made; the Raja’s pretext is that he considers it beneath him to match his daughter with any man.’

John Wilson has written an interesting and well-documented account of the practice and its gradual suppression in Western India. Wilson’s account deals particularly with the tribes of the Jarejas, but will serve to illustrate the whole subject. The Jarejas were Rajputs who had at one time become Muslims but for political reasons had broken with Islam and again desired to become Rajputs. In the meantime, they had intermarried with Muslims and so lost caste, and other Rajputs were most unwilling to intermarry with them. They therefore found the problem of finding husbands for their daughters very acute. Jonathan Duncan discovered that amongst these Jarejas it was no unfrequent practice among them to put their daughters as born to them to death by immediately causing their mothers to starve them.

In 1805 Major Alexander Walker, then Resident at the court of the Gaekwar in Gujerat, was instructed to take up this matter, and he put into it all the energy and idealism with which he was so richly endowed. Kachh and Kathiwar, in which the evil most abounded, were not under direct British rule, but the Company exercised a certain suzerainty, which in later days came to be called paramountcy. It did not normally interfere in internal affairs, though its control grew tighter as the years passed. In the early years of the century it had to proceed in the matter of infanticide rather by moral persuasion than by process of law. Proposals by the Bombay Government to bring greater pressure to bear were but faintly praised by the Government of India. ‘The speculative success even of that benevolent project, cannot be considered to justify the prosecution of measures which may expose to hazard the essential interests of the state; although as a collateral object, the pursuit of it would be worthy of the benevolence and humanity of the British Government.’ Sir John Shore, when Governor-General, at a somewhat earlier date had come to a similar conclusion. He stated that ‘prohibition enforced by the denunciation of the severest temporal penalties would have had little efficacy in abolishing a custom which existed in opposition to the feelings of humanity and natural affection’.

In spite of this imposed caution, Major Walker at once began to get to grips with the problem. He gives an interesting account of the traditional origin of infanticide. ‘The Jadejas relate, that a powerful Raja of their caste, who had a daughter of singular beauty and accomplishments, desired his Rajgur, or family Brahman, to affiance her to a prince of desert and rank equal to her own. The Rajgur travelled over many countries, without discovering a chief who possessed the requisite qualities; for where wealth and power were combined, personal accomplishments and virtue were defective; and in like manner where the advantages of the mind and body were united, those of fortune and rank were wanting. The Rajgur returned and reported to the prince that his mission had not proved successful. This intelligence gave the royal mind much affliction and concern as the Hindus reckon it to be the first duty of parents to provide suitable husbands for their daughters; and it is reproachful that they should pass the age of puberty without having been affianced, and be under the necessity of living in a state of celibacy. The Raja, however, rejected, and strongly reprobated every match for his daughter, which he conceived inferior to her high rank and perfections. In this dilemma the Raja consulted his Rajgur; and the Brahman advised him to avoid the censure and disgrace which would attend the princess remaining unmarried, by having recourse to the desperate expedient of putting her to death. The Raja was long averse to this expedient, and remonstrated against the murder of a woman, which, enormous as it is represented in the Shastra, would be aggravated when committed on his own offspring. The Rajgur at length removed the Raja’s scruples, by consenting to load himself with the guilt and to become in his own person responsible for all the consequences of the sin. Accordingly the princess was put to death; and female Infanticide was from that time practised by the Jadejas.’ The story may or may not be literally correct, but it is true in spirit. Major Walker soon discovered that there were two customary methods of destroying girl babies: one by the administration of opium and the other by suffocation immediately after birth.

Major Walker began by endeavouring to persuade the Muslim Rao of Kachh to use his influence in this matter. That ruler replied to the effect that female infanticide was a custom of immemorial antiquity with which he was not prepared to interfere. In 1809, after much perseverance in spite of many disappointments, Major Walker succeeded in persuading the principal Jarejas of Kathiawad to sign an agreement acknowledging the long-practised female infanticide and promising to abjure it. The agreement, however, was not genuine, and after Major Walker’s transfer female infanticide continued, though its scale seems to have been somewhat reduced as a result of his activities. In 1834 a census of Jarejas in Kathiawad showed that though there were three times as many female children alive as in 1824, and though in one taluk or sub-division females actually exceeded males, infanticide was still the general rule. The constant pressure exerted by certain British officials was however beginning, though slowly, to produce its effect, but further steps were required. A periodical census of the Jarejas was then introduced and at the same time the chiefs were warned that they would be heavily fined if the practice continued. A few heavy fines were inflicted, and the chiefs began to realise that the British Government were in earnest about this matter.

At this stage certain enlightened officials such as Erskine, then Political Agent in Kathiawad, considered that education and propaganda would afford the best help of eradicating the crime, and two Brahman Pundits were engaged to produce pamphlets pointing out how contrary female infanticide was to the principles of Hinduism and of religion in general.

It is interesting to note that Wilson, writing in the middle of the century, severely criticised this action on the grounds that a Christian Government had no business ‘to preach superstition or practice imposture . . . even to promote the cause of humanity’. This was indeed an aspect of the continual struggle between those who thought that Britain should westernise Indian thought and beliefs as far as possible and those who held that the better course was to assist in the development of the Hindu way of life on its own lines.

Propaganda alone was not enough, and the Government rightly began to insist on coercive measures. The greater firmness now displayed induced the Rao of Kachh and other local rulers to issue proclamations against infanticide. No spectacular results were produced, but gradually the perseverance of the Government and British officials had its effect. Progress was watched through annual returns; and the mere knowledge that such returns were being submitted and enquiries being made at last influenced local chiefs in Western India. The census figures for Kathiawad show that whereas in 1834 out of 174 Jareja infants under one year of age, only 44 were females, in 1837 the proportion was 60 out of 183, and in 1841 232 out of 506. The figures continued to improve, and by 1851 the Government was able to claim that ‘there is now in Kacch a continued approximation of the sexes’.

It is not necessary to follow this story in detail. Its chief interest lies perhaps in the determination of the British Government to stamp out a practice which it regarded as barbarous and its cautious and gradual method of achieving that aim. In dealing with the crime of thuggee the Government could safely take a strong line, but in the case of infanticide, where the utmost care had to be taken not to disregard the rights of domestic privacy, different methods were required. In spite of this necessity of gradualness, female infanticide in Western India was reduced to negligible proportions in a space of little more than half a century from the date when it first came to the notice of the company. The historian of that achievement wrote with pardonable pride: ‘We have quenched the funeral pyre which destroyed the widow; and we are stemming the torrent of infant blood shed by the hands of unnatural parents . . . we have dispersed and destroyed the bands of thugs and dacoits.’ Much of the paragraph in which this statement occurs would today be regarded as jingoistic, but it is impossible to understand nineteenth-century India without constantly remembering that a new spirit of moral earnestness—a missionary spirit in the truest sense—was at work amongst the British in India.

Chapter XXII

Suttee

Suttee: The Sanskrit word is sati, i.e. chaste or virtuous. In modern usage it is usual to employ the spelling suttee to denote the practice of self-immolation and sati to denote the person who performs it. That usage is followed in this chapter.

Perhaps few books have influenced the pattern of Indian life and thought more than the Mahabharata. In a well-known part of that epic occurs a description of the dispute between the two wives of King Pandu as to which of them was entitled to die upon his funeral pyre. The translation of it in the Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies of the Abbé Dubois is as follows:

‘King Pandu had retired into the jungles with his two wives, there to devote himself to acts of penance. At the same time a curse was imposed upon him, which doomed him to instant death should he dare to have intercourse with either of them. The passion which he felt for the younger of his wives, who was extremely beautiful, overcame all fear of death; and, in spite of the fact that for several days she continued to represent to him the dire results that must necessarily follow his incontinency, he yielded at last to the violence of his love; and immediately the curse fell upon him. After his death, it was necessary to decide which of his two wives should follow him to the funeral pyre, and there arose a sharp altercation between them as to who should enjoy this honour.

‘The elder of the two spoke first, and, addressing the assembly of Brahmins who had gathered together for the purpose, she urged that the fact of her being his first wife placed her above the second. She should, therefore, be given the preference. Besides, she urged, her companion had children who were still young, and required their mother’s personal care and attention for their bringing up. The second wife admitted the seniority of the first; but she maintained that she alone, having been the immediate cause of the sad death of their common husband in allowing him to defy the curse which doomed him to perish, was thereby entitled to the honour of being burnt with him. “As regards the bringing up of my children,” she added, addressing the other wife, “are they not yours just as much as they are mine? Do not they call you mother? And by your age and experience are you not better fitted than I to attend to their bringing up?”

‘In spite of the eloquence of the younger wife, it was at last unanimously agreed by the judges that the first wife should have the preference—a decision at which the latter lady was greatly delighted.’

On 5th December 1829, more than two thousand years after King Pandu’s romantic death, the great shoemaker, missionary and orientalist, William Carey, received a document from the Governor-General of India with a request that he would translate it. ‘It was nothing less than the famous Edict abolishing sati throughout British dominions in India! Springing to his feet and throwing off his black coat, he cried, “No church for me today! . . . If I delay an hour to translate and publish this, many a widow’s life may be sacrificed.” By evening the task was finished.’

These two quotations bring out vividly the irreconcilable antagonism of the Hindu and the European views on this subject. By the good Hindu, the woman who gave this last proof of devotion was greatly venerated and was recognised to have acquired great merit; whereas to the Englishman, and indeed to the Christian generally, the practice could not be but profoundly repugnant.

Suttee thus presented to the East India Company a far more difficult problem than female infanticide. In dealing with the latter crime, though caution might be necessary, the British Government at least knew that the general body of Hindu sentiment was on its side. In the case of suttee its suppression meant disregard of both Hindu thought and feeling, and in deciding whether to suppress suttee or not the British Government were in effect deciding whether to accept Hindu standards of value for India or to denounce them, at least in this respect, as barbarous. The authorities are not agreed as to the date when suttee first appeared in Hindu practice. At one time Hindus traced it back to a passage in the Rig Veda, but practically all modern scholars have agreed with Max Müller in regarding that version of the text as a Brahmanical distortion. Some authorities hold that suttee was introduced into India from Scythian sources, while others—with perhaps a greater degree of probability—maintain that it was a pre-Aryan custom in India which, along with other primitive and barbarous practices, Hinduism in due course absorbed. Be that as it may, it was established at an early date, well over two thousand years before the rule of the East India Company.

It did not become equally common throughout India. Bengal, Rajputana and the Southern Indian kingdom of Vijayanagar were its main mediaeval strongholds; and Edward Thompson is perhaps right in connecting its position in Bengal with the worship of the terrible goddess Kali.

Suttee was never in theory a religious obligation, but only a highly meritorious act which must secure its due reward in the next life. By suttee a widow not only earned beatification; she also sanctified her ancestors, expiated the crimes of her husband and gained for herself rest through countless ages. It was said of her that ‘accompanying her husband she shall reside so long in swarga¹⁰ as are the 35,000,000 of hairs on the human body’. Or again: ‘Dying with her husband she sanctifies her maternal and paternal ancestors; and the ancestry of him to whom she gave her virginity. Such a wife, adoring her husband in celestial felicity with him, greatest, most admired, with him shall enjoy the delights of heaven while fourteen Indras reign.’

The rite was highly praised by ancient lawgivers, and it had, as we have seen, a stirring precedent in that great epic the Mahabharata. Colebrooke in his digest of Indian law was able to say of it: ‘No other effectual duty is known from virtuous women at any time after the death of their lords.’

There was a story, too, of a goddess who, ‘to avenge an insult to Iswara, in her own father’s omission to ask her lord to an entertainment, consumed herself in the presence of the assembled gods’ and in due course was reincarnated as Parvati, the spouse of Siva. Henceforth she was also known as Sati—the virtuous or the chaste.

It is not difficult to see how, with all the force of high precedents and romantic semi-religious stories behind it, suttee for a woman of high character and class was transformed from a pious act, a work of supererogation, almost into an obligation. As might be expected, strong social pressure was often brought to bear on a widow to induce her to make this sacrifice. Innumerable theories have been put forward as to the psychological and philosophical foundations of the practice. The position of women in the Hindu’system, masculine arrogance, jealousy, and the joylessness of life for the Hindu widow—all these and many others have been suggested. This problem lies outside our scope in this book; we are only concerned with the fact that, among certain classes and throughout large areas of India, women of good class were almost expected to die on their husband’s funeral pyres. The natural resistance to so dreadful an ordeal may have been weakened by the knowledge that the life of a Hindu widow was one of misery. She was expected to eat only one meal a day, never to sleep on a bed, never to wear attractive clothes, and indeed to enter on a life of renunciation. The Abbé Dubois tells us that after the mourning for her husband is completed the friends and relatives ‘next join together in lamenting her widowhood, and finally make her sit on a small stool. Then, one of her nearest female relatives, having previously muttered some religious formulae, cuts the thread of the tali, the gold ornament which every married woman in India wears round her neck. The barber is called in, and her head is clean shaved. This double ceremony sinks her instantly into the despised and hated class of widows. . . . Doomed to perpetual widowhood, cast out of society, stamped with the seal of contumely, she has no consolation whatever except maybe the recollection of hardships she has had to endure during her married life’.

Even with this emotional and religious background, for the average widow the horror of the funeral pyre must have been stronger than her fear of the miseries of widowhood. The question, therefore, naturally arises, as to how far suttee in general was voluntary. It is unfortunately impossible to answer this question. There were undoubtedly women who, upheld by love or ecstasy or belief in the future or by racial and family pride, went happily to the funeral pyre and indeed Rajput history is full of the stories of such women. Others there were, perhaps the greater number, who were given no choice; who were badgered by Brahmans and relations to the point of distraction till they resolved to make the great sacrifice. There must, too, have been many who fell in neither class—who wanted to be sati but found that the spirit was willing and the flesh weak. To them, again and again, cruel compulsion was applied and indeed once a woman had finally announced her intention of performing the rite, she was seldom allowed to retract. The following report by a superintendent of police, Ewert, based on personal observation is of much interest.

‘It is generally supposed that a Suttee takes place with the free will and consent of the widow, and that she frequently persists in her intention to burn, in spite of the arguments and entreaties of her relations. But there are many reasons for thinking that such an event as a voluntary Suttee very rarely occurs; few widows would think of sacrificing themselves unless overpowered by force or persuasion, very little of either being sufficient to overcome the physical or mental powers of the majority of Hindoo females. A widow, who would turn with natural instinctive horror from the first hint of sharing her husband’s pile, will be at length gradually brought to pronounce a reluctant consent, because, distracted with grief at the event, without one friend to advise or protect her, she is little prepared to oppose the surrounding crowd of hungry Brahmuns and interested relations, either by argument or force. . . . In this state of confusion a few hours quickly pass, and the widow is burnt before she has had time even to think on the subject. Should utter indifference for her husband, and superior sense, enable her to preserve her judgement, and to resist the arguments of those about her, it will avail her little—the people will not be disappointed of their show; and the entire population of a village will turn out to assist in dragging her to the bank of the river and in keeping her down on the pile. Under these circumstances nine out of ten widows are burnt to death.’

The Abbé Dubois gives a dramatic account of a suttee in which the elements of freewill and compulsion were perhaps blended in their normal proportions, and the scene thus described must have been so common as to justify a lengthy quotation.

‘In 1794, in a village of the Tanjore district called Pudupettah, there died a man of some importance belonging to the Komatty (Vaisya) caste. His wife, aged about 30 years, announced her intention of accompanying her deceased husband to the funeral pyre. The news having rapidly spread abroad, a large concourse of people flocked together from all quarters to witness the spectacle. When everything was ready for the ceremony, and the widow had been richly clothed and adorned, the bearers stepped forward to remove the body of the deceased, which was placed in a sort of shrine. . . . Immediately after the funeral car followed the widow, borne in a richly decorated palanquin. On the way to the burning ground she was escorted by an immense crowd of eager sightseers, lifting their hands towards her in token of admiration and rending the air with cries of joy. She was looked upon as already translated to the paradise of Indra, and they seemed to envy her happy lot.

‘While the funeral procession moved slowly along, the spectators, especially the women, tried to draw near to her to congratulate her on her good fortune, at the same time expecting that, in virtue of the gift of prescience such a meritorious attachment must confer upon her, she would be pleased to predict the happy things that might befall them here below. With gracious and amiable mien she declared to one that she would long enjoy the favours of fortune; to another that she would be the mother of numerous children who would prosper in the world; to the third that she would live long and happily with a husband who would love and cherish her; to a fourth that her family was destined to attain much honour and dignity and so forth. . . .

‘During the whole procession, which was a very long one, the widow preserved a calm demeanour. Her looks were serene, even smiling; but when she reached the fatal place where she was to yield up her life in so ghastly a manner, it was observed that her firmness suddenly gave way. . . . Her looks became wildly fixed upon the pile. Her face grew deadly pale. Her very limbs were in a convulsive tremor. . . . The Brahmins who conducted the ceremony, and also her near relatives, ran quickly to her, endeavouring to keep up her courage and revive her drooping spirits. All with no effect. The unfortunate woman, bewildered and distracted, turned a deaf ear to all their exhortations and preserved a deep silence.

‘She was then made to leave the palanquin, and as she was scarcely able to walk, her people helped her to drag herself to a pond near the pyre. She plunged into the water with all her clothes and ornaments on, and was immediately afterwards led to the pyre, on which the body of her husband was already laid. The pyre was surrounded by Brahmins, each with a lighted torch in one hand and a bowl of ghee in the other. Her relatives and friends, several of whom were armed with muskets, swords, and other weapons, stood closely round in a double line, and seemed to wait impatiently the end of this shocking tragedy. This armed force, they told me, was intended not only to intimidate the unhappy victim in case the terror of her approaching death would induce her to run away, but also to overawe any persons who might be moved by a natural feeling of compassion and sympathy, and so tempted to prevent the accomplishment of the homicidal sacrifice. . . . The poor widow was instantly divested of all her jewels, and dragged more dead than alive, to the pyre. There she was obliged, according to custom to walk three times round the pile . . . during the second (round) her strength wholly forsook her, and she fainted away. . . . Then, at last, senseless and unconscious, she was cast upon the corpse of her husband. . . . At that moment the air resounded with noisy acclamations. The Brahmins, emptying the contents of their vessels on the dry wood, applied their torches, and in the twinkling of an eye the whole pile was ablaze.’

To complete the balance of the picture it is right to quote from the account of another suttee, which was not only voluntary, but in which the widow strenuously resisted for five days all the attempts of the British official, Captain Sleeman, to dissuade her from the act. He finishes his description in Rambles and Recollections as follows: ‘After bathing, she called for a pan (betel leaf) and ate it, then rose up, and with one arm on the shoulder of her eldest son, and the other on that of her nephew, approached the fire. I had sentries placed all round, and no other person was allowed to approach within five paces. As she rose up fire was set to the pile and it was instantly in a blaze. The distance was about 150 yards. She came on with a calm and cheerful countenance, stopped once, and, casting her eyes upward, said, “Why have they kept me five days from thee, my husband?” On coming to the sentries her supporters stopped—she walked once round the pit, paused a moment, and, while muttering a prayer, threw some flowers into the fire. She then walked up deliberately and steadily to the brink, stepped into the centre of the flame, sat down, and leaning back in the midst as if reposing on a couch, was consumed without uttering a shriek or betraying one sign of agony.’

Voluntary or otherwise the practice of suttee was horrible to Western minds, and the question naturally arose quite early in the British period as to whether it should be suppressed or not. There were, indeed, precedents, though of a somewhat unsatisfactory character. In 1510 the Portuguese Viceroy, Albuquerque, had prohibited suttee in Goa; but as the Portuguese made no pretence of respecting Hindu ideas and sentiments, that afforded little guidance. Certain of the Mughal emperors had also forbidden it and had to some extent enforced the prohibition in the area round Delhi. Their position was, in a sense, easier than that of the British, in view of the frank Muslim contempt for Hindu practices; though it must be noted that the two emperors who were most active in this matter, Akbar and Jahangir, were also the most tolerant of the Mughals.

Baji Rao, the last Peshwa of the Marathas, also discouraged suttee, but the practice had never been very common amongst the Marathas. The prohibitions of the Dutch, the French and the Danes meant little, as they applied only to their small settlements and it was easy enough for their inhabitants to perform the rite outside the local boundaries.

Far different was the position of the East India company. When the problem first came to the notice of its servants, the Company was only just beginning to consolidate its power, and it had, moreover, declared its intention of respecting both Hindu and Muslim beliefs and allowing the free exercise of religious rights. Warren Hastings, with whom this principle was fundamental, caused an enquiry to be made as to the orthodox Hindu view suttee, and the very definite replies of the pundits in favour of the practice led him to decide against intervention.

In the time of Cornwallis, a British magistrate who had on his own initiative stopped suttee from taking place referred the general question for orders and was told that he must in future confine himself to dissuasion. Other British officials from time to time prohibited suttee, but no official policy was then forthcoming. William Carey then set to work to collect evidence as to the prevalence of the practice in Bengal. The results of his investigation were indeed startling and their publication in 1805 coincided with another specific reference to the Government by a magistrate. Wellesley, never the man to shirk an issue, referred the question to the Nizamat Adalat, or Chief Criminal Court, with a view to action. The judges did not advise the abolition of suttee, but recommended strict enforcement of the limitations placed on it by Hindu law. It must be strictly voluntary from start to finish, and no pregnant woman or mother with young children should be allowed to become a sati. Unfortunately Wellesley left India a few weeks after the judges made their recommendation, and his successor, Lord Minto, left the problem alone.

For seven years no action was taken by the Government. In 1812 yet another magistrate raised the question, and the Government issued orders on the lines suggested by the judges. They also directed that notice of all suttees should be given to the police, who could attend to see that the limitations laid down were observed. This was a most unfortunate order, for it meant in effect that the representatives of the British Government gave the sanction of their presence to such suttees as were in accordance with Hindu law. It created a reaction in favour of the practice. As a magistrate (quoted in Edward Thompson’s Suttee) reported: ‘Previous to 1813 no interference on the part of the police was authorised, and widows were sacrificed legally or illegally as it might happen; but the Hindoos were then aware that the Government regarded the custom with natural horror, and would do anything short of direct prohibition to discourage and gradually to abolish it. The case is now altered. The police officers are ordered to interfere, for the purpose of ascertaining that the ceremony is performed in conformity with the rules of the shastras, and in that event to allow its completion. This is granting the authority of Government for the burning of widows; and it can scarcely be a matter of astonishment that the number of sacrifices should be doubled when the sanction of the ruling power is added to the recommendation of the shastra.’ The report is supported by ample contemporary evidence.

Individual officers, and even a judge of the Nizamat Adalat, urged prohibition, but the Government of India still considered that this would be generally resisted and might lead to rebellion. They also believed that the general spread of enlightenment would put an end to the practice. The great Hindu reformer Rammohan Roy shared this view. He preached valiantly against suttee, even at the risk of his own life, but he considered that prohibition would be premature and therefore inexpedient. He set himself, in the meantime, to build up Indian public opinion against suttee, and he prepared a petition containing the following terrible indictment: ‘Cases have frequently occurred when women have been induced by the persuasion of their next heirs, interested in their destruction, to burn themselves at the funeral pile of their husbands. That others, who have been induced by fear, to retract a resolution rashly expressed in the first moments of grief, of burning with the deceased husband have been forced down upon the pile and then bound with ropes and green bamboos until consumed with the flames; that some, after flying from the flames, have been carried back by their relatives and burnt to death.’ Rammohan Roy nevertheless did not advocate prohibition.

As has happened more than once in the history of British India, the Home Government took a sounder view than the Government of India, and in 1823 they called the pointed attention of that Government to the evil results of the existing regulations and the need for a fresh consideration of the whole problem. It was, however, left for Lord William Bentinck, a Governor-General of high moral courage, to take the essential step and prohibit suttee throughout British India. Some of the Governor-General’s principal counsellors, including Rammohan Roy, advised against this step, but the Governor-General had fortified himself with the opinions of a large number of civil and military officers. Some, like Charles Metcalfe, feared that something like a rebellion might arise, but nevertheless considered that the risk must be run; the majority of those consulted did not share those fears. On 4th December 1829 Regulation XVII made suttee illegal in Bengal and laid down that persons assisting, even in a voluntary suttee, would be guilty of culpable homicide. Similar legislation was passed shortly afterwards in Bombay and Madras.

The rebellion which some had feared did not take place, nor indeed were there any widespread disturbances, though a large number of Bengali gentlemen petitioned the Privy Council against this interference with their rights and liberties. In spite of his previous doubts, Rammohan Roy lent his great support to the action taken by Lord William Bentinck and the petition was rejected. Although occasional suttees continued right down to modern times, as far as any general practice was concerned the regulation was immediately effective in British India.

Some modern writers have criticised the British Government harshly for its delay in prohibiting this barbarous practice, and Edward Thompson, who is not always quite fair to the British, has gone so far as to say that suttee provides an example of British timidity. This is perhaps hardly a balanced view. In the first place, the Company’s determination to respect Hindu religious feeling was a matter not just of expediency but of principle, and there can be no doubt that Hindu sentiment approved of suttee. Secondly, it must be remembered that in the early nineteenth century the English in India had a profound belief in the possibilities of achieving reform by persuasion and propaganda rather than by coercion. Thirdly, until the time of Wellesley, British power was not sufficiently consolidated to make the prohibition of suttee a practical possibility. To have succeeded, so soon after the effective establishment of its power, in suppressing a practice supported by an overwhelming majority of Hindu opinion and feeling, was surely an achievement of which the Company might well be proud.

Attention was then turned to suttee in the native states. The British Government exercised no control over the internal affairs of most of those states and paramountcy had not yet acquired all its later significance. Opportunities to interfere had to be made, and in the matter of suttee no chance was let slip. In some cases mere pressure was sufficient, and in other cases the lapse of the rulership to the British Crown on failure of direct heirs provided an opportunity for securing suppression; while in certain states a rajah’s desire for a Treaty led him to agree to prohibit suttee. Success in the first Sikh War greatly enhanced British prestige and strengthened the pressure which the Governor-General could bring to bear on those Rajputana states where the practice was most strongly entrenched. It is not possible here to follow this process in detail and it need only be recorded that one by one the Rajput states surrendered to British pressure and that the last suttee at the death of an Indian ruler was in 1861. The battle was indeed won by 1850, and the suttee in 1861 was merely its last shot.

In his very stimulating study of this subject Edward Thompson has drawn attention to one important effect which the practice of suttee had on Europeans. More than any other factor it taught the average Englishman disrespect for the Hindu way of life and thought. Whatever the other evidence might be, he would not regard as civilised a people who burned widows alive. It was a long time before this attitude changed, and it is no exaggeration to say that suttee helped to create the gulf between the English and the people of India, and perhaps to retard the association of Indians with the Government of India. Insufficient attention has been given to this aspect of the matter, and in view of its importance we may conclude this chapter by a quotation from the Calcutta Review of 1867 which Edward Thompson used to illustrate his thesis:

‘To put the matter in a lower but a very practical light, we say that advancement of natives to high posts of emolument or responsibility was simply impossible while such relics of dark ages and dark superstitions were fostered or endured. The most grotesque and horrible incongruities would arise had suttee kept pace with our avowed and earnest desire to see natives taking a larger share in the government of the country. Imagine a native country gentleman dying who was a member of the Governor-General’s Council for making laws, and the Viceroy, on sending a message of condolence to his family, being quietly told that his wives had all burnt themselves the day before; or the native Justices of the Peace for the town of Calcutta stating their inability to attend a discussion on the waterworks of the metropolis because they wished to follow the widow of one of their number to her husband’s pile at Chitpore or Garden Reach; or a Bengalee member of the Civil Service, for such there may be, refusing to subscribe to the civil fund because he would, under the Shastras, be only survived by his widow for the space of twelve hours!’

Chapter XXIII

The Administrative Impact

We have studied in some detail various aspects of the growth of British administration in India. It is now necessary to look on the picture as a whole and to analyse the main general effects of the system on the people of India, who were now for the first time brought under the influence of an efficient all-India governmental machine.

Throughout most of her history before the eighteenth century India had been divided into a large number of independent states, characterised by no common pattern of government and exhibiting individually no defined trend of administrative development. To the student of history who turns his attention from Europe to India this absence of a progressive principle is both bewildering and depressing. He finds nothing in Indian history corresponding to the continuous growth of the art of government in a particular direction to which he has been accustomed in his studies of Britain, or France or most West European countries. On the contrary, he finds that Tod’s description of administration in early nineteenth-century Rajputana would have applied equally well a thousand years earlier, and that this unprogressiveness was a general characteristic of Indian governments. Many attempts have been made to explain it. Some writers have seen it as the natural result of the Hindu philosophy; others have connected it with the rigidity of the caste system; while yet others have attributed it to the parochialism resulting from the smallness of many of the kingdoms concerned.

None of these attempts is satisfactory, and it is more profitable to turn from them to consideration of the exceptional cases, where some more dynamic principle was at work.

Thrice during the long history of pre-British India administrations altogether superior to the general run of Indian governments and containing within themselves the seeds of progress have emerged from the surrounding chaos. The first of these was the empire of the Mauryas, whose rulers were amongst the greatest men that India has known. Law and order were well maintained, the population enjoyed security and it would have been well for India if this empire could have endured. Nevertheless it was ruled with great severity on the basis of an all-pervading system of espionage, and according to some contemporary observers individual freedom was completely disregarded. This lack of personal freedom may have been a necessary price to pay for peace under early Indian conditions, but at any rate it is one of the most important differences between the empire of the Mauryas and that of the British. They had in common an efficient bureaucracy and a lofty conception of official duty.

Six hundred years later Chandragupta I founded another great empire, altogether milder in character and less destructive of human freedom than that of the Mauryas. Our knowledge of its administration is sadly inadequate, but it appears that, although peace and security were well maintained, it was not as ruthlessly efficient or all-pervasive in its influence as the earlier empire. The next attempt at empire-building was so entirely the work of one great king that it is of little importance for our purpose. King Harsha, the human dynamo, came like a whirlwind and departed without leaving much permanent effect on the Indian people.

The third great pre-British administration was that of the Mughals, which has already been studied in detail. We need only say here that, while it was efficient and scientific, it was pivoted on one man and was so constructed as to prevent a growth of that hereditary aristocracy which alone could have given it stability.

We are now in a position to ask what were the features that differentiated the British Empire from the best of these early Indian administrations. Efficiency can hardly be claimed as one of them, for it is a matter of degree and the Maurya Empire attained a high standard, while Akbar’s administration was not far behind. Nor can the existence of a highly trained civil service be regarded as something new to India. In the rare periods when India was well governed such a service was necessarily built up. Perhaps the most important characteristic of British administration was its impersonality. It did not fundamentally change character with changes in Secretaries of State or Viceroys, and its strength or weakness at any particular time never depended on one man, as did that of all previous empires in India. It was in fact a machine which had to be tended, but the tempo or performance of which did not vary much with the mood or personality of the tender. More than one Viceroy found the machine too strong for him and could not remould the pattern of India as he would.

This machine-like character of the administration was the source of both weakness and strength. Its defect was that it produced a lack of sensitiveness to the feelings of the people and to new currents of thoughts and desires, which sometimes led to trouble. Moreover, it bred a race of administrators who were accused of conscientious aloofness. Indian politicians have often complained that though British officials worked zealously for the country they did not love or understand its people. This was often not true of individual District Officers and others whose main work was in the villages rather than in their offices, but as an indictment of the spirit of British rule it is not entirely untrue. British Governments in India were apt to consider the welfare rather than the feelings of Indians. This tendency became stronger in the twentieth century when political differences estranged the British officials from the Indian intelligentsia, though not from the rural population.

The impersonality of the administration nevertheless gave it the quality of endurance. It did not depend on particular men, and so was not greatly affected by their coming or going, their success or failure. It was, indeed, a necessary instrument of the policy, implicit in so much of British activity in the middle of the nineteenth century, that India was to the utmost possible extent to be brought under Western influence. British bureaucracy was the relentless machine, ever turning in one direction, by which that result was achieved.

The second important characteristic of the British Government in India was its almost exaggerated respect for personal liberty. The principle became somewhat obscured, although it was never forgotten, in the political struggles of the twentieth century, but at the period when British power was at its height it was never questioned. Freedom of speech, of association and of action within the law existed to a remarkable degree and there were few countries where a man was so free from the danger of arbitrary arrest or punishment as in British India. Chandragupta Maurya and Akbar would both have been horrified at the limitations which the British Government imposed on its own powers, and it is clear that no previous government in India had ever acknowledged the rights of the individual against the state.

Two other marked characteristics of British administration under the Crown were its integrity and its insistence on the equality of all before the law. In this latter respect the special provisions for the trial of Europeans by Europeans present a departure from the general principle, but even here the difference was mainly one of procedure and not of the penalties to which the offender was liable.

We see, then, that Britain built up in India an administration distinguished from other Indian systems of government by its impersonality, its recognition of personal liberty, its integrity and its insistence on equality before the law. Although it, to some extent, borrowed the mechanics of the Mughal administration, it was in spirit a new creation. It rapidly developed the most powerful and closely knit bureaucracy in the world, and it contributed to that organisation many of the ablest young men of the British universities. Their conscious superiority must have been a continual irritation to educated Indians, but they brought to India qualities in which the country was deficient. In their junior days as District Officers they enjoyed an almost incredible authority and prestige; while in their later years they were absorbed in the impersonal secretariat machine, which was thus kept in constant touch with the needs of the country.

The benefits which accrued to India as a result of this unique administration are described in other chapters of this book. Chief amongst them may be listed the maintenance of peace and order, the rule of law, the belief in liberty, the modernisation of the country, the laying of firm financial foundations for the state, the fight against famine and disease, the increase in agricultural resources and the provision of stable political and economic conditions in which commerce and industry could develop. There is, however, one result of British administration which, although in some respects the most important of all, is so intangible that it might escape attention. It is the unifying influence exercised on India by an all-powerful impartial bureaucracy determined to secure equality and dedicated to the establishment of a uniform system of administration. For the first time in history India became administratively one; and for the first time, in spite of the undoubted cultural unity which had existed for centuries, her inhabitants could assert the existence of a common Indian nationality. Let us make this a little more concrete. Three of the leading figures in the Indian nationalist movement before the transfer of power were Mahatma Gandhi, Mr. M. A. Jinnah and Sri Subhas Chandra Bose. What had these three men in common? Certainly not religion, nor native language, nor family customs, nor way of life. They shared, indeed, in a common Indian culture which has never been wholly overlaid by religious or provincial differences, but most of all they were united by the demand for liberty, the belief in the parliamentary system and the conviction that all men had equal rights before God and the law. Every one of these ideas was the direct result of British administration; none of them existed in ancient or mediaeval India. A common system of law and a uniform code of government produced a large measure of unity, and it was not an accident that English was the first language in which an Indian could, in the most comprehensive sense say: ‘I am an Indian.’

That British administration achieved much of value and turned India from a backward mediaeval country into a great modern state is scarcely disputed by any modern writer. Were there any compensating ill effects?

Perhaps the most serious adverse effect of British administration was that it pressed too heavily on the people of India, not by reason of any tyranny—which was singularly absent—but by its sheer weight and efficiency. This pressure operated in two ways. In the first place it led India, particularly after the Mutiny, to regard British rule as permanent; something to be taken for granted. Not for thirty years after the Mutiny did educated Indians begin to think actively of complete self-government, and even then for another twenty years their dreams were bounded by some limited form of local self-government under the British aegis. Such long-continued acquiescence in a foreign rule, however benevolent, is necessarily demoralizing and destructive of initiative. Under its chilling influence, mental and spiritual expansion is retarded and it was partly for this reason that in the nineteenth century India failed to progress even in those directions, such as industry and commerce, where development was fully open to her.

The second manner in which the heavy pressure of British administration operated was by engendering in the Indian mind an undue dependence upon the Government for everything. A Government which seemed to be all-powerful and of vast resources would clearly do everything that required collective attention, and private enterprise and charity in public fields were thus not stimulated. The District Officer became the father and mother of the district. If a new school were needed, it was he who would start it; when a new dispensary was required, the District Officer would secure the necessary grant from the Government and, in due course, watch over the finances and administration of the new institution. Many District Officers, particularly in the latter years of British rule, fought hard against this undue dependence upon them, but it was inherent in the system. Indeed the better the District Officer the worse the evil, for his benevolence and strength were the measure of the extent to which the local inhabitants could afford to remain inactive in public causes. To some extent this was in keeping with Indian tradition. Whenever and wherever India has enjoyed relatively firm and benevolent rule, the rulers have done much that in Europe is left to private enterprise; but the tendency to depend upon the state was greatly strengthened by the immeasurable superiority of the British Empire in efficiency and resources to previous Indian rulers. This excessive paternalism of the Government and its District Officers necessarily broke down the traditional forms of local self-government in many areas. Panchayats¹¹ and similar institutions disappeared, not from any hostility on the part of the Government, but because they seemed almost unnecessary against the background of an all-powerful and ubiquitous government. People thus lost whatever little they once had of the habit of doing things for themselves.

A not dissimilar factor was at work in the higher levels of society. Although the Cornwallis policy of deliberate exclusion of Indians from the upper levels of administration was abandoned, there was in practice little opportunity in the nineteenth century for Indians to occupy high administrative posts. Indians of good class who were not prepared to be subordinates thus took to specialised professions, such as the law, and acquired experience in the manipulation of words rather than in organisation. At a later stage, when serious steps in the direction of self-government were taken, it was found that few of those who played a leading part in Indian politics were qualified by experience for great administrative posts in the state.

The four factors enumerated above, namely, the long acquiescence in foreign rule, the growth of undue dependence on Government, the disappearance of indigenous institutions of local self-government and the exclusion of Indians from the higher ranks of administration, combined to produce serious psychological effects on the Indian public. They built up a deep-seated sense of inferiority, which manifested itself first in a slavish desire to imitate the West and then, by natural reaction, in a somewhat aggressive self-assertiveness. This in turn led in the twentieth century to a truculent insistence on an equality which nobody any longer wished to deny and to the desire to demonstrate that equality by breaking loose from all previous connections. At a later stage this tendency was minimised by the tactful way in which British and Indian statesmen handled the transfer of power, but it nevertheless gave a certain unreality to the Indian approach to foreign affairs at that time.

This unreality was also partly due to the fact that India had been politically cut off from international affairs during the British period. It is true that, in one sense, the British connection infinitely widened the the scope of India’s foreign contacts. Those contacts, however, were in the sphere of culture or commerce. Until the transfer of power, India’s diplomatic representation abroad was conducted mainly through the British officials of His Majesty’s Government, and Indians thus had little chance of learning the feel of international affairs.

These adverse effects were not due to anything particularly reprehensible in British administration, but were rather the inescapable results of foreign rule. Sir Thomas Munro, one of the ablest and most respected of the Company’s servants in the early nineteenth century, shrewdly diagnosed the trouble.

‘The strength of the British Government,’ he wrote, ‘enables it to put down every rebellion, to repel every foreign invasion, and to give its subjects a degree of protection which those of no Native Power enjoy. Its laws and institutions also afford them a security from domestic oppression unknown in Native States; but these advantages are dearly bought. They are purchased by the sacrifice of independence, of national character, and of whatever renders a people respectable. The natives of British provinces may, without fear, pursue their different occupations as traders or husbandmen and enjoy the fruits of their labours in tranquillity; but none of them can look forward to any share in the civil or military government of their country. It is from men who either hold or are eligible for public life that nations take their character; where no such men exist, there can be no energy in any other class of community. No elevation of character can be expected among men who in the military line cannot attain to any rank above that of subadar, where they are as much below an ensign as an ensign is below the commander-in-chief, and who in the civil line can hope for nothing beyond some petty judicial or revenue office in which they may by corrupt means make up for their slender salary.’

These demoralising results of foreign rule are to be set against the advantages which British administration conferred; and since it is difficult for an Englishman to weigh the one against the other impartially, let us accept the judgment of some of the wisest and most intelligent Indian reformers of their day.

The first such judgment is from a speech by Raja Rammohan Roy, generally regarded as the most outstanding figure in the first half of the nineteenth century in India—a great reformer and a man of unlimited courage. Speaking at the City of London Tavern on the occasion of a dinner given to him by the Honourable East India Company on 6th July 1831 he said: ‘Before the period in which India had become tributary to Great Britain it was the scene of the most frequent and bloody conflicts. In the various provinces of the Eastern Dominions, nothing was to be seen but plunder and devastation; there was no security for property or for life, until, by the interference of this country, the great sources of discord were checked, education has advanced and the example of the British system of dominion had a conciliating effect on the natives of the East.’

The second quotation is so well known as to be almost hackneyed, but as the considered judgment of one of the greatest Indian patriots it must carry great weight. Mr. Gokhale, apostrophising the British, said, ‘The blessings of peace, the establishment of law and order, the introduction of Western education and the freedom of speech and appreciation of liberal institutions which have followed in its wake—all these are things which stand to the credit of your rule.’

The third quotation is from a paper read at the East India Association in 1867 by Dadabhai Naoroji, for long known by his fellow countrymen as ‘the grand old man of India’. After speaking of the anarchy and insecurity of the pre-British period, he goes on to say: ‘Contrast this with the results of British rule. Law and order are its first blessings. Security of life and property is a recognised right of the people, and is more or less attained according to the means available, or the sense of duty of the officials to whom the sacred duty is entrusted. The native now learns and enjoys what justice between man and man means and that law instead of the despot’s will is above all. To the enlightenment of the country, the results of the universities and educational establishments bear witness. In place of the old general darkness and ignorance, thousands of natives have derived, and millions will derive hereafter, the benefit of the highest degree of enlightenment which man has obtained. In material progress it can easily be seen what impulse will be given to the development of the natural resources of the country by railways, canals, public roads, etc., but more by the introduction of English enterprise generally. . . . The last but not least of the benefits which India is deriving at the hands of the British is the new political life they are being inspired with. They are learning the most important lesson of the highest political condition that a nation can aspire to. The freedom of speech which the natives are now learning the necessity of, and are enjoying, and with which the natives can now talk to their rulers face to face for what they want is another invaluable blessing.’

It is true that some writers have contended that the good effects of British administration were the result of world tendencies in the nineteenth century and would have appeared in India even independently of British intervention. It is impossible to give a dogmatic negative to a purely speculative assertion of this kind. We can only say that whereas the forces which led to great progress, both moral and material, in nineteenth-century Europe were already clearly at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were in India no signs of any such influences in the period just before British rule. On the contrary, there was every mark of disintegration and decay, and it is therefore reasonable to give the British credit for the good features which they introduced and to let them take the blame for any attendant drawbacks. Perhaps the true meaning of the British administration in India has never been better set forth than by the Viceroy at the state banquet on the occasion of the visit to India of the Prince of Wales in January 1875.

‘There is one thing above all others,’ said the Viceroy, ‘that this British Empire in India does mean. It means this. It means that all its subjects shall live at peace with one another; that every one of them shall be free to grow rich in his own way, provided his way be not a criminal way; that every one of them shall be free to hold and follow his own religious belief without assailing the religious beliefs of other people, and to live unmolested by his neighbour. At first sight, that may seem a very plain and simple polity, and very easy to be applied. But when you come to apply it to an empire multitudinous in its traditions, as well as in its inhabitants, almost infinite in the variety of races which populate it and of creeds which have shaped their character, you find that it involves administrative problems unsolved by Caesar, unsolved by Charlemagne, unsolved by Akbar. It seems a very simple thing to say that we shall keep the peace of the empire; but if we are to keep the peace of it, we must have laws to settle quarrels which would otherwise disturb its peace; and if we are to have such laws, we must frame them into a system at once comprehensive and intelligible. Again, if we are to enforce any such system of law, we must have judges to administer it, and police to carry out the orders of the judges, and then we must have troops to protect the judges, the police, the people and all concerned. Well then, when you come to introduce this elaborate system of administration into a vast continent . . . you find that the work in which you are engaged is nothing less than this, that you are modifying, unavoidably modifying—not harshly, not suddenly, but slowly, gently and with sympathy, but still modifying—the whole collective social life and character of the population of the Empire.’

Section III — The Political Impact

Chapter XXIV

The British connection with India led to the complete transfer of power in 1947 on the basis of partition, followed by the creation in both India and Pakistan of federal parliamentary constitutions. Although the particular form taken by self-government was the result of historical forces—some of which had not generally been foreseen—the ultimate independence of India had for long been implicit in British policy. It was, indeed, a natural result of the remarkable growth of Indian nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That growth has been regarded by some writers as the most valuable product of British influence, and by others as an inevitable reaction against foreign rule. The two views are not necessarily incompatible, but before they can be reconciled it is necessary to study how and in what soil Indian nationalism grew. This in turn demands an investigation as to the origins of Indian nationality.

It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the general relationship of nationalism to nationality, and it will serve our purpose if we say that whereas nationality is a sense of unity, a group consciousness, nationalism is a general demand that the members of the nationality be under their own government. Nationalism is thus only genuine where it corresponds to the fact of nationality. This maybe made clearer by two illustrations. Before the Second World War certain people, who doubted the wisdom of granting full self-government to India alleged that the Indian nationalist movement was bogus in as much as there was no genuine Indian nationality; there were, they said, Bengalis, Madrasis, Punjabis, and so on, but no Indians. Again, when the transfer of power drew near, the demand of the Muslim League for the creation of Pakistan was based on Mr. Jinnah’s famous ‘two-nation theory’. There was, he asserted, no such thing as Indian nationality.

Clearly these statements require examination, but the initial difficulty is to define our terms. What is nationality? Perhaps the clearest answer to this question is that given by John Stuart Mill in Representative Government. ‘A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality,’ he says, ‘if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history and consequent community of recollections, collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.’

Race, language, religion, social traditions and political association under a common government, may thus be regarded as the five elements which normally produce nationality; yet none of them is indispensable and none of them will necessarily produce nationality. The basic test is, indeed, the sense of separateness and solidarity; nationality exists when those concerned believe in it. When, therefore, we enquire whether an Indian nationality existed before the time of the British, we have to consider not only if the usual elements of nationality were present, but also if there is, in contemporary records or literature, any evidence of such a group consciousness. Let us begin with the normal elements of nationality, of which race is perhaps the most important.

India with its great racial complexity offers an attractive field to the anthropologist, and scientists from many countries have conducted detailed research into nasal indices, head forms, pigmentation, stature, hair characteristics, and other features that form the accepted basis of ethnological classification. As a result of these enquiries there is general agreement that in spite of much intermarriage there are today seven separate racial types in modern India—types so distinct that even the layman can identify them. They range from the Turko-Iranians in the north west to the Mongolo-Dravidians in the east and the Dravidians in the south. It is not necessary to follow this classification in detail, for the racial separateness of the Bengali, the Madrasi and the Punjabi is beyond dispute. Nor is there any ground for thinking that a greater degree of homogeneity prevailed at any earlier period; indeed, the further we go back in the history of the last three thousand years the greater is the diversity of race. It is true that nearly all Indians have some physical characteristics in common, and that the experienced observer has no difficulty in picking out an Indian in London, whatever his community or caste may be. This, however, is equally true of the people of Europe, and does not indicate community of race. The conclusion is, indeed, inescapable that race neither provides nor ever has provided a basis for an Indian nationality.

When we come to language as an element in nationality, a similar conclusion appears. Of the one hundred and seventy-nine languages listed in the 1921 Linguistic Survey of India, many are spoken by so few people that their inclusion merely fogs the issue. A clearer picture is given by the statement of Grierson, the greatest authority on this subject, that ‘five great families of human speech have their homes and vernaculars in India. These are the Aryan, the Dravidian, the Munda, the Monkhmer and the Tibeto-Chinese’. When the writer was associated with the recruiting propaganda of the Government of India during the Second World War, every recruiting poster had to be issued in about a dozen main languages, dialects and languages spoken by a few million people being ignored. Language in India tends to divide rather than to unite, and cannot therefore be an element in a common nationality. The use of English as a lingua franca for a time provided an important binding element, and thus presented the rulers of independent India with a dilemma shortly after the transfer of power. To continue English as the official language of India was politically embarrassing, while to discontinue its general use on public occasions was to invite a relapse into mutual unintelligibility. As often happens with sensible people, a formula was found. It secured the practical advantage of the continued use of English without abandoning the theoretical determination to replace it by Indian languages for public purposes.

In some countries religion has been the determining element in nationality, and this might have been so in India but for the Muslim invasions and the caste system. Minorities other than the Muslims might have fitted into a Hindu nationalist pattern. The Sikhs are themselves an offshoot of Hinduism, the Parsis have been particularly careful not to let religion separate them from the general body of the population, and the Christians have never been sufficiently numerous and important to present a major problem. Hinduism itself has always been intellectually tolerant and incredibly absorptive, but Islam confronted it with a system which could not be assimilated. It is true that, at certain points, Hindu and Islamic philosophy have interacted, and that in the United Provinces something like a common culture was in process of evolution before the transfer of power. It is equally true that in some areas Muslims have been so far Hinduised as to introduce the equivalent of a caste system. These facts must not, however, blind us to the essential antithesis of Islam and Hinduism.

In philosophy, ceremonial, the way of life they engender, and in their effect on character, no two religions could be further apart than Hinduism and Islam. The writer has attempted to describe this contrast in an earlier work, The British in India. ‘The difference in outlook goes right down to such fundamental concepts as the nature of the Deity and the appropriate manner of worshipping him. The Moslem believes in a Creator completely separated from his creation and in the survival of the individual soul after death. His attitude towards life is essentially positive and individualistic, and it follows that both he and his Creator must have a separate and permanent existence. Mohammed is indeed the Prophet of God, but he is not God—the gulf between the Deity and his creatures is unmistakable. Moslem worship is simple, indeed austere, and neither idols nor pictures are allowed. Until recent times, indeed, the use of photographs or pictures, even outside the religious sphere, was regarded as blasphemy against the Creator. There is much in Islam akin to the stern, austere and unyielding spirit of seventeenth-century Puritanism, and both religions alike are characterised by a democratic equality based on an unyielding belief in the importance of the individual.

‘Hinduism, on the other hand, is infinitely complicated, luxuriant in its forms and ideas and abounding in symbols. The Creator and his creations are one and indivisible, as we have seen in an earlier chapter; there is no limit to the possible manifestations of the all-pervading spirit, and a new God may therefore turn up at any time or place. The individual matters little, for he, after all, is but one link in an endless chain beginning and ending in a somewhat nebulous merging with the all-pervading spirit. As for equality, it is a concept necessarily foreign to Hinduism, with its highly stratified society. It is important to emphasise the fundamental difference between the psychological foundations of the two religions—Islam, clear-cut, individualistic, democratic, simple—Hinduism, abstruse, caring little for the individual, essentially undemocratic and extremely complicated.’

To these philosophical and spiritual differences must be added the barriers of everyday life. The prohibition of intermarriage, the refusal to eat together, the different customs with regard to food, the difference of apparel, all combined to make any mental and moral fusion of Hindus and Muslims difficult. People of different religions can undoubtedly be united in a common nationality, as in Germany, but when those religions erect as complete a social barrier as that between the Hindus and Muslims it is difficult for the people concerned to acquire those ‘common sympathies which do not exist between them and any other’ which Mill has rightly considered to be the foundation of nationality. Therefore at no time in the last thousand years could religion have been an element in a single Indian nationality.

India, however, might in theory have contained more than one nationality. Are there any signs that Hinduism was building up what might be called a Hindu nationality in pre-British India? It is difficult to discover any evidence of such a process though Pandit Nehru and some other modern Indian writers have seen in the Gupta Empire a nationalist movement of resistance against foreign invasion. Detailed analysis fails to support this view, and even Pandit Nehru in his Discovery of India recognises that it was only the Brahman and Kshatriya element in the country which was ‘forced to think in terms of defence, both of their homeland and their culture’. It must be remembered that not only did the Gupta Empire never effectively extend south of the Narbada, but also that the Brahmans and Kshatriyas, who alone were interested in the Brahmanical revival, formed but a small proportion of the population of the country. Then, as throughout the Middle Ages in India, the ordinary cultivator was little interested in and not greatly disturbed by wars and conquests of kings. His position was like that of most Englishmen during the Wars of the Roses. Neither in the Gupta Empire nor in the struggles of Yorkists and Lancastrians can we see the workings of any genuine nationalism.

Nor is there anything in the history of India after the Gupta period which suggests that any kind of Hindu nationalism was beginning to develop. Again and again Hindu disunity made things easy for the invader, and the aloofness of Jai Chand, when the great Prithviraj was defeated by the Muslim king of Ghor at Tarain in 1192, is merely a classical example of a common phenomenon. Iswari Prasad, the modern historian of mediaeval India, rightly attributes the easy success of the Muslims to the fact that the Hindus lacked unity and organisation. ‘In the numerous states that existed all over India, we do not find a single ruler capable of organising them into an imperial union for purposes of common defence.’ This judgment is beyond serious dispute. In spite of the cultural unity of large parts of India in the Middle Ages, there was no unifying force strong enough either to bind her together for defence or to give rise to any genuine nationality.

Even if the Hindu kings had not shown this fatal inability to combine, it is doubtful if Hinduism, founded as it is on the caste system, could have provided the basis of nationality. Nationality depends on solidarity and a sense of unity, while caste proceeds from a recognition of unalterable divisions. Nationality needs, above all, a common pride. What pride could there be in common between a Brahman and an Untouchable whose very shadow would pollute him? Lest this should be thought to be a prejudiced British view, let us quote Indian scholars who have pondered deeply on this subject. Rabindranath Tagore, himself a great nationalist and generally regarded as India’s greatest philosopher-poet, had no doubt on this subject, when he wrote in Nationalism as follows: ‘Nationalists say: look at Switzerland, where in spite of race differences the people have solidified into a nation. Yet remember that in Switzerland the races can mingle, they can intermarry, because they are of the same blood. In India there is no common birthright, and when we talk of Western Nationality we forget that the nations there do not have the physical repulsion, one for the other, that we have between different castes. Have we an instance in the whole world where a people who are not allowed to mingle their blood, shed their blood for one another, except by coercion or for mercenary purposes? And can we ever hope that these moral barriers against our race amalgamation will not stand in the way of our political unity?’

Since Tagore wrote this events have moved rapidly. Indians have indeed shed their blood for one another and Indian nationality has become a reality. It is nevertheless true that the caste system was a formidable obstacle to the growth of nationality. Iswari Prasad puts the matter very clearly in his Mediaeval India: ‘The elaborate ceremonial purity enjoined by the Brahminical religion and the peculiar character of caste, based upon the most invidious distinctions, broke up society into watertight compartments. National interests were frequently subordinated to the interests of a sectional caste. The importance of birth in the caste system, which profoundly affected the Hindu religion, created artificial barriers which prevented the unification of the various groups for the useful purposes of common defence and safety. Even the great leaders and captains of war thought in terms of caste and found it impossible to shake off the influence of the narrow groove in which they lived and moved from their very birth.’

Enough has perhaps been said to show that Hinduism could not have been expected to provide the basis of nationality in pre-British days and was not in fact even beginning to do so.

We have thus seen that three of the five elements of nationality, to which we referred earlier, did not exist either in ancient or mediaeval India. The two remaining elements—common social traditions and political association under a common government—require only the briefest consideration. Hindu India had undoubtedly a common historical and cultural tradition, enshrined particularly in the great epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and in the many Puranas. Unfortunately, the operative part of the tradition was based mainly on the caste system, so that the emphasis was always on division rather than on unity. Hinduism was essentially not a collection of doctrines but a social code; and since religion was a dividing force, social tradition could not be otherwise. It could not, therefore, provide a foundation for a Hindu nationality. As regards political association, it might, in the absence of adverse circumstances, have given rise to a dozen or so distinct nationalities corresponding to the principal Hindu Kingdoms but it could never in pre-British times have led to a common Indian nationality.

It appears, then, that none of the normal elements of nationality was present before the nineteenth century. The final test, however, is not the presence or absence of these elements, but the existence or nonexistence of a sense of unity. Is there any evidence that at any stage the people of India thought of themselves as one, or, to put it in more concrete form, that individuals throughout India thought of themselves as Indians? No such evidence is forthcoming, and the only possible conclusion is that the concept of Indian nationality did not exist. Some authorities have supported this view by philological arguments such as the absence in most vernaculars of a true word for ‘Indian’ or even ‘India’. The writer prefers to regard this as an illustration rather than as a proof of the fact, which is abundantly clear otherwise, that there was no Indian nationality before the British period.

Under British rule the people of India began to be subjected to the influence of an efficient and powerful government, bent on introducing uniformity in many spheres. Race, language, religion, and social conditions might continue to separate, but political association under one rule began to weld the people of India together. The process was necessarily slow and had not got very far by the time of the Mutiny. We have in an earlier chapter given reasons for not regarding the episode as a national uprising, and it is inconceivable that it could have been so limited in effect and so easily suppressed if Indian nationality had been a reality. After the Mutiny, however, new factors began to strengthen the influence of political association under a common rule, and to quicken the simultaneous growth of nationality and nationalism. English education, the development of modern communications, local self-governing institutions, early steps towards a small measure of self-government, and the foundation of the Congress Party, all hastened this process. After it had gone to a certain length, resentment at alien rule was engendered, and this in turn provided a fresh binding link. The presence of leading Indians on political platforms perhaps did more than anything else to foster the idea of nationality amongst the educated classes. It was left to Mr. Gandhi in the twentieth century to take that idea to the masses and so provide a broad basis for future self-government. Those who were privileged to work in India during the twentieth century could see the development of nationality going on before their eyes. In the early part of the century it was still true to say that, except amongst the educated classes, the concept of nationality did not exist. By the beginning of the Second World War this was no longer true. Even though the masses might be supremely ignorant of any of the detailed issues under discussion they were, in general, conscious of a desire for independence and of a new unity which, though they could not have defined it, was in fact nationality.

The fact that Indian nationality first developed under British rule must not automatically be set down to the credit of the British. It is first necessary to discover how far it was part of the British purpose, how far it was a mere by-product of a strong bureaucratic government, and how far it was the result of a hostile reaction against foreign rule. These questions will be considered in the next chapter. Before embarking on that chapter two final points on the subject of nationality remain to be made.

We have seen that Indian nationality developed not from community of race, language, religion or social conditions, but from very recent political association under the British Government. It is, therefore, a nascent, synthetic product, and may possess less stability than a natural growth. This is particularly important because of the continuing danger that India may be split into linguistically homogeneous provinces, which would have strong centrifugal tendencies. The wisest of the rulers of India have set their faces against this development, but the demand for it is very vocal and the danger is real. It is yet too early to be certain whether Indian nationality will be stable or not.

The second point relates to the creation of Pakistan. Since Indian nationality was in a sense an artificial growth, it depended solely upon the sense of unity which Indian politicians claimed had come into being. It was, however, abundantly clear to the outside observer just before the transfer of power that the ninety million Muslims did not share this feeling. They had a group consciousness of their own. The same logic which compels us to admit that in the twentieth century an Indian nationality had developed requires us equally to recognise that the Muslims had built up a nationality of their own. All the arguments of race, language, and the like which could be used to show that the Muslims of India were not a nation, could equally be applied to the people of undivided India. If consciousness of unity is the test, the Muslim claim to a separate nationality was justified. It is true that two nationalities can coexist in one state, as in Switzerland or even in the U.K.; but they are only able to do so if the communities are not antagonistic and if intermarriage is allowed gradually to soften the distinction between them. This condition did not apply in the case of Hinduism and Islam, and partition, whether good or bad in itself, was the inevitable result of the acceptance of the principle of nationality. That principle is in many ways dangerous. It split up Austria and Hungary to the great detriment of European peace; it has created an insoluble problem in Ireland; and it may well prove to be the most prolific source of future wars. It was, however, regarded as gospel by early twentieth-century popular thought, and the partition of India was in accordance with it.

Chapter XXV

The Growth of Indian Nationalism: (1) Education and Religion

That the pressure of a uniform British administration, and of Western thought, would ultimately result in the growth of Indian nationalism and in a demand for self-government, was apparent to the wisest British administrators early in the nineteenth century. Lord Hastings,¹² a firm but liberal Viceroy, wrote in his Private Journal in 1818 of a ‘time not very remote when England will wish to relinquish the domination which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country, and from which she cannot at present recede’. Lord Hastings was fortunate enough to be served by four of the greatest military and civil officials known in Indian history—Sir Thomas Munro, the Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone, Sir Charles Metcalfe and Sir John Malcolm. Each of these men was outstanding both in ability and in personality, as well as in understanding of the Indian way of life; and each of them shared the liberal principles of Lord Hastings. Elphinstone, perhaps the most remarkable of them all, of whom it was said by Bishop Heber ‘he had seen more of India and the adjoining countries than any man now living’, never ceased to preach the importance of training Indians for that self-government which, he believed, must eventually come. As early as 1819 he wrote of our Indian Empire that ‘the most desirable death for us to die of should be, the improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would render it impossible for a foreign nation to retain the government; but this seems at an immeasurable distance . . . A time of separation must come; and it is for our interest to have an early separation from a civilised people, rather than a rupture with a barbarous nation, in which it is probable that all our settlers and even our commerce would perish, along with all the institutions we had introduced into the country’.

A little later, when Elphinstone was Governor of Bombay, his views had further crystallised. Lieutenant-General Briggs, visiting his camp one day and observing in his tent a pile of printed Marathi books, asked what they were for. ‘To educate the native,’ said Elphinstone, ‘but it is our highroad back to Europe.’ Thirty years later, the refusal of the Directors to appoint Indians to the Covenanted Medical Service drew forth a spirited protest from this great servant of India: ‘I conceive that the administration of all the departments of a great country by a small number of foreign visitors, in a state of isolation produced by a difference in religion, ideas, and manners, which cuts them off from all intimate communion with the people, can never be contemplated as a permanent state of things. I conceive also that the progress of education among the natives renders such a scheme impracticable, even if it were otherwise free from objection. It might, perhaps, have once been possible to have retained the natives in a subordinate condition (at the expense of national justice and honour) by studiously repressing their spirit and discouraging their progress in knowledge; but we are now doing our best to raise them in all mental qualities to a level with ourselves, and to instil into them the liberal opinions in government and policy which have long prevailed in this country, and it is vain to endeavour to rule them on principles only suited to a slavish and ignorant population.’

It was, indeed, abundantly clear that there was no half-way house. Either Britain must adopt a policy of deliberate reaction and screen India from all Western and progressive influences, or she must look forward to a day when India would demand independence. Sir Thomas Munro, Elphinstone’s great contemporary, expressed a similar view with vigour: “We should look upon India, not as a temporary possession, but as one which is to be maintained permanently until the natives shall in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices, and become sufficiently enlightened, to frame a regular government for themselves, and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time shall arrive, it will probably be best for both countries that the British control over India should be gradually withdrawn. That the desirable change contemplated may in some after-age be effected in India, there is no cause to despair. Such a change was at one time in Britain itself at least as hopeless as it is here. When we reflect how much the character of nations has always been influenced by that of governments, and that some, once the most cultivated, have sunk into barbarism, while others, formerly the rudest, have attained the highest point of civilisation, we shall see no reason to doubt that if we pursue steadily the proper measures, we shall in time so far improve the character of our Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect themselves.” This kind of statement may irritate modern educated Indians intensely, and be regarded by them as breathing the spirit of patronage. It does, however, leave no room for doubt that these great British Indian administrators regarded self-government for India as the inevitable goal of British administration.

The third member of the quadrumvirate, Sir Charles Metcalfe, outdid Munro in liberalism in one respect, for whereas Munro considered rigorous control of the Press essential, Metcalfe, when acting as Governor-General, removed practically all restrictions on it. The fourth of these great lieutenants of Lord Hastings, Sir John Malcolm, was a warm advocate of intensive education, in order to make it possible to employ Indians widely in high administrative posts. Such education, according to him, should be in the vernacular rather than in English, but it would nevertheless be the vehicle for conveying Western thought.

They were supported in their aims by Lord Macaulay, whose influence on Indian affairs was great. His belief that ‘it may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown our system . . . that having become instructed in European knowledge, they may in some future age demand European institutions’, and his affirmation that when this happened it would be the proudest day in English history, are well known to all students of Indian affairs. Even more important is that passage in his great House of Commons speech in which he said: ‘Are we to keep these men submissive? or do we think we can give them knowledge without awakening ambition? or do we mean to awake ambition and provide it with no legitimate vent? Who will answer any one of these questions in the affirmative? Yet one of them must be answered in the affirmative by every person who maintains that we ought permanently to exclude the people of India from high office. I have no fears. The path of duty is plainly before us, and it is also the path of wisdom, of national prosperity, and of honour.’

Not by any means all British administrators in India shared these liberal views. The important thing is that in the first half of the nineteenth century those who saw the vision of the future were the men who counted the most in our Indian affairs. About the middle of the century the vision seemed to fade for a time. Ellenborough, an erratic and aggressive Viceroy, so distrusted by the Court of Directors that they recalled him before his time, spoke frankly in 1853 of his belief that the English must continue to rule India. This feeling became perhaps more general after the Mutiny, and, with shining exceptions like Lord Ripon, British administrators in India were on the whole less liberal in their views in this period than were their predecessors. Sir Henry Cotton, writing in 1906 after thirty-five years’ service in the Indian Civil Service, spoke of ‘the unwillingness of the English community in India to recognise the signs of the times’ and regretted that even the great majority of the officials employed under Government . . . are as directly opposed as non-officials can be to giving effect to a policy of general sympathy and encouragement of all national and popular aspirations’.

By this time, however, other forces before which all reactionary opposition was to be swept aside were in operation. The significant fact for our purpose is that those forces had been generated deliberately and consciously by the greatest British administrators and officials of the earlier period.

The most important element in that process was the introduction of Western education, with English as its basis. The progress of education under British rule cannot be studied in detail in this book; we are concerned here only with the effects of the decision, embodied in the famous resolution of 7th March 1853, that the promotion of European literature and science was to be the aim of British educational efforts henceforth.

Education occupied little of the Company’s attention in the first few decades of British rule. Consolidation and organisation of the newly acquired territories taxed its servants’ energy to the utmost, and, in any case, education was not a state affair, even in England, at that time. Early in the nineteenth century, however, a strong sense of responsibility for the advancement of India was developing and enlightened administrators, missionaries, and Members of Parliament all combined to demand action in the educational sphere. In 1811 Lord Minto deplored the intellectual backwardness of the times and feared that ‘the revival of letters may shortly become hopeless from a want of books or of people capable of explaining them’. After his retirement from the Company’s service, Charles Grant spent much of his time and energy advocating the widespread establishment of English schools; while in Bengal the missionaries Carey and Marshman and the rationalist David Hare founded schools and gave practical impetus to the movement. At home Wilberforce, whose interest had been secured by Grant, lent his powerful support, and in 1813 the Company’s new charter provided for the expenditure of one lakh of rupees annually on ‘the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India’. Whatever the intentions of Parliament may have been, the clause was vague and provided scope for a fierce and protracted controversy, both within and without the Committee of Public Instruction, between those who would encourage Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian studies and those who wished to concentrate entirely on Western learning and the English language. The foundation of a Sanskrit college in Calcutta called forth a spirited protest from Rammohan Roy, the great reformer, who had assisted David Hare in the establishment of a Hindu college in which both Western and Eastern science and literature were to be taught in Indian languages as well as in English. The condemnation of what he regarded as a retrograde step is so remarkable as to justify a lengthy extract.

‘When this seminary of learning was proposed, we understood that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian subjects. We were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy and other useful sciences which the nations of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of the other parts of the world. . . . We now find that the Government are establishing a Sanskrit school under Hindoo pundits to impart such knowledge as is already current in India. . . . The pupils will here acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty subtilties since produced by speculative men, such as is commonly taught in all parts of India. The Sanskrit language, so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its perfect acquisition, is well known to have been for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge; and the learning concealed under this almost impervious veil is far from sufficient to reward the labour of acquiring it. If it had been intended to keep the British nation in ignorance of real knowledge, the Baconian philosophy would not have been allowed to displace the system of schoolmen which was the best calculated to perpetuate ignorance. In the same manner the Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep this country in darkness, if such had been the policy of the British legislature. But as the improvement of the native population is the object of the government, it will consequently promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy with other useful sciences which may be accomplished by employing a few gentlemen of talents and learning educated in Europe, and providing a college furnished with the necessary books, instruments and other apparatus.’

Against this a member of the Committee of Public Instruction argued that ‘tuition in the European sciences is neither among the sensible wants of the people nor in the power of Government to bestow’.

For another decade the controversy continued. In 1829 Bentinck lent his great authority to the support of the Anglicists, and finally Macaulay’s brilliant but dogmatic and scornful minute clinched the matter. The Orientalists were routed, and although vernacular education was ultimately to receive attention, English and Western learning were henceforth to have preference over Sanskrit and Arabic studies. This was perhaps the most momentous decision in the history of British India. Some modern Englishmen—including the writer in his younger days—have been apt to sentimentalise over the disappearance of Sanskrit as the principal medium of culture and to deplore a policy which seemed to deprive a people of any natural intellectual and cultural roots. A sounder view would appear to be that India had long been in a state of intellectual torpor, and the shock required to galvanise it into activity again could only come from without. The impact of Western thought, made possible by English education, provided that shock and in due course Indian thought once more became creative. India was again joined to the general body of world thought. Soon her best minds began to be permeated by new ideas in science, history and politics. Sardar K. M. Panikkar, the Indian historian and diplomat, has justly acclaimed the Macaulay minute, in spite of all its narrow prejudice, as having led to the most beneficently revolutionary decision taken by the British Government of India, and has gone so far as to say in his Survey of Indian History: It is the genius of this man, narrow in his Europeanism, self-satisfied in his sense of English greatness, that gives life to modern India as we know it.’

Clearly the effects of such a change of educational policy could not be felt for a generation, and it is perhaps significant that organised political activity in India began about twenty years after this great educational decision. Signs of national consciousness and of political aspirations had, however, begun to appear much earlier than this. Amongst the earliest of such signs was the memorial to the Governor-General and Council and the King in Council against the Press ordinance of 1823. The vernacular Press in Calcutta was then in its infancy and consisted of only two Bengali and two Persian newspapers. The memorial is believed to have been drafted by that great man, Rammohan Roy, who founded two of these four papers and who is indeed generally regarded as the father of the Indian Press. Although the memorial is full of the spirit of loyalty and even gratitude to His Majesty’s Government, its tone is one of firm and dignified protest. The memorialists not only demand the right to enjoy the freedom of the Press; they support that claim by reference to the virtual exclusion of Indians from important offices of state. This just complaint was to be the foundation of the Indian political demand for many years, and it is therefore worth quoting. ‘In former times native fathers were anxious to educate their children according to the usages of those days, in order to qualify them for such offices under government as they might reasonably hope to obtain; young men had the most powerful motives for sedulously cultivating their minds, in the laudable ambition of rising by their merits to an honourable rank in society; whereas, under the present system, so trifling are the rewards held out to native talents, that hardly any stimulus to intellectual improvement remains; yet, Your Majesty’s faithful subjects felt confident, notwithstanding these unfavourable circumstances, the natives of India would not sink into an abysmal lethargy while allowed to aspire to distinction in the world of letters and to exercise the liberty of the Press with a moral and intellectual improvement, which are of far more value than the acquisition of riches or any other temporal advantages under arbitrary power.’ Far more important than this particular instance of early political activity was the new awakening of thought and feeling which it indicated and in which Rammohan Roy was a central figure. Renewed contacts with the West had already produced a ferment of ideas and compelled thinking men to examine afresh what they had long taken for granted. When their attention was thus forcibly directed to the superstitions and degrading practices which had crept into Hinduism, it was inevitable that some of them should begin to question the foundations of their faith. To this new impulse men reacted differently according to their temperament and caste of mind. Some saw the danger that Hinduism would be destroyed by the influence of Western thought and braced themselves to resist innovations as dangerous; others rushed headlong to Christianity or agnosticism; while yet others sought for a synthesis of what was good in Hinduism and Christianity.

Chief amongst this last group was Raja Rammohan Roy. Born in 1772, he spent the first twenty years of his adult life in the service of the East India Company, but retired in 1814 to think and to write. He had been profoundly influenced by his presence, as a boy, at the involuntary suttee of his sister-in-law and had been led by that experience to give much thought to the true principles of Hinduism. At the time of his retirement he was already a learned man in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian and proficient in English, but, being attracted by certain aspects of Christianity, he set himself to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to facilitate his study of the Bible. Certain aspects of Christianity appealed to him so strongly that he published The Precepts of Jesus—The Guide to Peace and Happiness, in the preface of which he wrote that Christianity ‘is so admirably calculated to elevate man’s ideas to high and liberal notions of the one God . . . that I cannot but hope for the best effect from its promulgation in its present form’.

Nevertheless he concluded that the central teaching of the Gospel had been overlaid by much that seemed to him unnecessary and even harmful, such as the Deity of Christ, and the controversy between himself and the missionaries soon made clear how wide a gulf separated him from Christianity. Meanwhile he continued his study of Hindu philosophy, and there, too, he was convinced that the pure theism of true Hinduism had been hidden by superstition and idolatry. He was not opposed to Brahmanism but to what he regarded as its perversion.

In 1828 he founded the Brahma Sabha, dedicated to a synthesis of the good in Hinduism and in Christianity and to the abolition of suttee and polygamy. In the same year he built a Brahma Sabha temple in Calcutta declared by its Trust Deed to be ‘for the worship and adoration of the eternal unsearchable and immutable Being who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe’. Nearly twenty years later, in 1846, Debendranath Tagore founded the Brahmo Samaj, which might be described as a slightly more formal and organised continuation of the Brahma Sabha. At a later stage the Samaj split into several sections, but in one form or another it provided the most vital element in progressive Indian thought during the nineteenth century. Its synthesis of two religions enabled its followers to absorb much of what was good in the West without separating themselves from their own Hindu traditions. It thus provided the spiritual basis for the combination of Western thought and true Indian nationalism which, in due course, was to give rise to the Congress Party and to lead to independence. If the most progressive Indian minds had wholly rejected Hinduism and, for example, embraced Christianity, they would have separated themselves completely from their fellow countrymen and could never have played a leading part in a national movement. This was a real danger in the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century, and the Bramho Samaj provided the best protection against it. If, on the other hand, thinking Hindus in general had stood entirely on the ancient ways, they would have cut themselves off from the main current of Western thought and could scarcely have been sponsors of a democratic liberal revolution. The Brahmo Samaj was the first great spiritual result of the impact of the West and it contained within itself the promise of political development. It is true that it was largely confined to Bengal, but that mattered little, since in the middle of the century Bengal led intellectual India.

Not by any means did all Indians react to the onslaught of Western thought on Hinduism in the same way as Rammohan Roy. Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the Arya Samaj in 1875, was a bitter critic of many of the worst features of modern Hinduism, but believed that the remedy lay in getting back to ancient Hindu scriptures. According to the great German savant, Max Müller, Dayanand maintained that ‘everything worth knowing, even in the most recent inventions of modern science, was alluded to in the Vedas’. He repudiated everything that had crept into Hinduism in post-Vedic times including caste and the doctrine of karma.¹³ He fought for social justice, and he presented his educated fellow countrymen with a form of Hinduism of which they could be proud. The basis of his teaching was, nevertheless, too narrow, and his glorification of the Vedas necessarily led to antagonism to other religions, and particularly to the Cow Protection Association, founded in 1882, which aimed at suppressing the Muslim practice of sacrificing cattle.

Certain other groups of Hindu thinkers were also concerned with the revival of Hindu pride and self-confidence, chief amongst them being the followers of the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and his more practical disciple, Swami Vivekananda. Ramakrishna cared little for practical politics, but he revived the cult of Bhakti or devotion, which the politically minded Swami soon linked with patriotism and the desire for independence. The Ramakrishna mission was primarily intended for social service, but religion and politics have always been closely intertwined in India, and the mission soon became a focus of national feeling. Although the teachings of Ramakrishna were pacific, the literature issued by the mission was much used for recruiting purposes by the Bengal terrorists in the twentieth century, and the consequent suspicion and dislike then displayed towards that mission by most British officials in Bengal still further strengthened its position as a training centre for patriots.

It is interesting to notice that these Hindu revivalist organisations only came into being in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the theory has been put forward by Thompson and Garratt that the revival was partly inspired by ‘a feeling of disgrace at the ineptitude displayed by so many Indians during the Mutiny’. It was also, no doubt, stimulated by the discoveries of European philologists and historians about the great Indian past, which Indians themselves had for so long neglected.

The impact of Western thought on Hinduism thus produced two main currents of thought which were afterwards to be united in the stream of Indian nationalism. The Brahmo Samaj attuned the minds of many Indian leaders to the new ideas of democracy and freedom, while the Arya Samaj and the revival amongst orthodox Hindus led to militant Hinduism, which for the first time gave real unity to Hindu India and built up a combative nationalism.

Chapter XXVI

The Growth of Indian Nationalism: (2) Early Organisation

The new educational policy soon began to bear fruit. In Bengal, Anglo-Vernacular schools were established in the districts by official agency, while in other provinces, although there was a time lag, missionaries and philanthropists co-operated enthusiastically with the Government in founding new educational institutions. One of the immediate results of the considerable intellectual activity now stimulated was the foundation of discussion and debating societies in many places. In Calcutta the students of the Hindu college formed an Academic Association, while others founded the Athenaeum. Yet another club was formed with the high-sounding name of The Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge. In these and similar bodies in other parts of the country attention was at first concentrated on religious and social reform. The new education was, however, almost entirely confined to the well-to-do and high-caste section of the urban population. It did not at that time touch the masses, and the young enthusiasts soon found that their discussions of social reform amounted to little more than beating the air. They therefore turned naturally to politics, where they were less likely to meet with opposition.

In that field, indeed, they would be encouraged by incipient nationalism, as well as by the new enthusiasm for Western ideas. English literature was just beginning to make its appeal to the best Indian minds, and through that channel the nascent European philosophy of democracy was to exercise a powerful influence in India. Leading European thinkers then had an exaggerated respect for the virtues of representative government, and right from the start of their new political consciousness Indian students were to assume the universal validity of the principles of parliamentary government. Burke, Macaulay and John Bright were to be the political oracles of Indian politicians for several decades, while Paine and Mazzini provided the emotional stimulus for the nationalist movement which throughout this period was at work only amongst the urban intelligentsia.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the ground was thus prepared for the growth of the various political associations which preceded the Indian National Congress. In its development Bengal led the way, under inspiration from England.

In 1837 the Bengal Zemindary Association (later known as the Bengal Landholders’ Society) was founded, primarily to resist encroachments on the rights of the landlords. Its formation was the result of the growing desire of the Bengal Government to give the cultivator that protection which should have accompanied the Permanent Settlement. Its scope was, nevertheless, wider than its name might suggest and it claimed to be based on liberal principles. About the same time a few English radicals had founded the British India Society in London, with the object of creating an interest in the conditions of India and in the graphical language of the founders ‘to fix the eyes of the entire nation on the extent . . . and the claims of British India’.

One of the most prominent members of this new Society was George Thompson, and his visit to Calcutta in 1842 led to the formation in 1843 of the Bengal British India Society, the purpose of which was the gradual advancement of the public welfare by peaceful means and on the basis of complete loyalty to the British Crown. It did not count for much, and the Bengal Landholders’ Society was the more important body of the two. Both Societies contained British as well as Indian members, but when in 1851 they were amalgamated into the British Indian Association that body was wholly Indian in composition. In spite of the liberal influence of its secretary, Kristo Das Pal, the British Indian Association was largely dominated by the landlords and scarcely represented the views of progressive Bengalis.

A fresh stimulus to the growth of political associations in India was given by the fact that the East India Company’s charter was due for renewal in 1853. Educated Indians had already begun to resent their virtual exclusion from superior government posts, and some organisation was clearly required to voice that feeling before Parliament gave the Company a fresh lease of life. It was with this in view that ‘the principal Hindus, Parsis, Muhammadans, Portuguese and Jews of Bombay’ met on 26th August 1852 to consider ‘the desirableness of forming an association with a view of ascertaining the wants of the people of this country and the measures calculated to advance their welfare and of representing the same to the authorities in India or in England’.

The speeches made at that meeting are illuminating and merit quotation.

Dadabhai Naoroji, one of India’s greatest patriots, in later years popularly known as the ‘grand old man’ of India, said: ‘Many ask what this Association means to do when it is well known that under our present government we enjoy an amount of liberty and prosperity rarely known to the inhabitants of India under any native sovereign. In reply to this it is said we ought to demand redress for our grievances. But what are those grievances? They may be many or none, yet nobody here is at this moment prepared to give a decided reply; when we see that our Government is often ready to assist us in everything calculated to benefit us, we had better, than merely complain and grumble, point out in a becoming manner what our real wants are. We are subject to the English government, whose principal officers being drawn from England do not, except after a long residence and experience, become fully acquainted with our wants and customs. Though they may always be anxious to do good to us, they are often led, by their imperfect acquaintance with the country, to adopt measures calculated to do more harm than good, while we, on the other hand, have no means of preventing such occurrences. The most we can do is complain through the medium of the paper. In time all is hushed up and the people carry with them the impression that Government has been unkind to them in not attending to their complaint. We have, therefore, to consider what we ought to do to secure our own good, and at the same time keep up a good understanding between us and Government.’

The chairman, Mr. Juggonathjee Sunkersett, spoke in the same strain: ‘Now, as the British Government acknowledge their duty to be to effect whatever good they can for the benefit of this country it is clear that their object and our object are one and the same. We are not in opposition to Government nor can Government be opposed to our objects, if it be shown that the good of the country is what we seek. The Government has the power to do much good and we have many a proof that they have the will also. I need not go far for these proofs. Witness this noble Institution which they so generously support and in which so many, who are now present, have received a most excellent education. . . . I might also refer to the recent appointment of so many Natives to the highly responsible situations of Deputy Collectors and Magistrates. The Government are willing, I am sure, to do what good they can. When they are correctly informed they will always be ready to act to the advantage of the people over whom they rule; but they are not in possession of full and correct information on all subjects connected with the welfare of the people. Besides their official sources of information, Government will be glad to have other channels of information on which they can rely. An Association like the one now established will doubtless be listened to with attention in respect to all matters which concern the wants and wishes of the people, which of course natives have better means of knowing than gentlemen whose time is engaged in the duties of their official situations.’

In appraising these assurances as to the benevolent intentions of the authorities, allowance has naturally to be made for the prudential considerations which must necessarily influence the first experimenters in political representation under an all-powerful government and in a country where such activities were entirely new. The valid inferences from these proceedings are the existence of grievances and a feeling that British officials were not in close touch with the people of the country.

Within a few months of its foundation the Association submitted a petition to the British Parliament, and this was followed by a second petition a year later. They were frankly critical of the existing constitution of India, and petitioned for a system ‘less cumbersome, less exclusive, less secret, more directly responsible and infinitely more efficient and more acceptable to the governed’. They acknowledged the many blessings they enjoyed under British rule, but these were ‘attributed to the British character rather than to the plan of government . . . which is but little suited to the present state of India’. They considered the dual authority of the Court of Directors and the Board of Control an anachronism; they deplored the control exercised by the Calcutta authorities over the governments of Bombay and Madras; they condemned the administration as being unduly expensive; and they characterised the attitude of many officials as being ‘despotic’. ‘The European local officers,’ they assert, ‘scattered over the country at great distances from one another, and having large districts to attend to, far beyond their powers of supervision, and dependent to a very great degree on their subordinates, are compelled to dispose of the greater part of their business in a very imperfect manner; and their statements to Government—whether emanating from persons who it is known may be trusted or from those in whose accuracy Government are aware no confidence can be placed—are on system accepted as equally trustworthy and the official vindication of the acts of government founded thereon. The necessary result of this system is that Government is one of first impressions.’

Matters were made worse, they alleged, by the secrecy in which all the doings of Government were said to be shrouded, and the result of the system was ‘to engender and perpetuate amongst the young servants of Government an illiberal and despotic tone; to give full scope to the prejudices, the ignorance, and the self-sufficiency of all; to discourage progress; to discountenance all schemes of improvement emanating from independent and disinterested sources, and not within the views of the officer to whose department they are referred; and to cramp all agriculture or commercial energy—all individual enterprise’.

The Association set an example for Indian politicians of a later generation by protesting against the ‘exorbitant salaries of many highly-paid officers whose duties are so trifling, or involve, comparatively, so little labour or responsibility that they might with advantage be amalgamated with other offices or remunerated in a manner commensurate with the nature of the duties to be performed’.

They dealt in some detail with the foreign character of the administration, and they claimed that ‘the time has arrived when the natives of India are entitled to a much larger share than they have hitherto had in the administration of the affairs of their country, and that the Councils of the local Governments should, in matters of general policy and legislation, be opened, so as to admit of respectable and intelligent natives taking a part in the discussion of matters of general interest to the country, as suggested by Lords Ellenborough, Elphinstone and others’. They repudiated the suggestion that Indians were not fit for situations of trust and responsibility, and they quoted with pride the statement of two leading members of the Bombay Bar that ‘the decisions of the Native Judges were in every respect superior to those of the European’. They further stated that the declaration of the Charter Act of 1833 that ‘no native of India or natural-born subject therein, shall be disqualified from office by reason only of religion, place of birth, descent or colour’ had remained for twenty years a dead letter. As a corollary to their protest against the exclusion of Indians, they demanded the abolition of the distinction between the covenanted and uncovenanted services.

They also demanded the inclusion in the Governor-General’s Council of judges in the Supreme Court and European and native citizens. It is interesting to note that they urged that the executive government should always include ‘some persons trained and experienced in public offices of England who can bring to the consideration of public affairs a more extended knowledge and wider view than are to be expected from those European gentlemen who have passed all their days from boyhood in the bad systems of this country, and know no other by which to compare and improve them’. Throughout the discussions in this period, there is this constant assumption that Britain and the British people are more liberal and magnanimous than their servants in India, of whom it is said that, ‘having freely participated in the advantages enjoyed by the Covenanted Service of the East India Company, have naturally become prepossessed in favor of things as they are’.

We have considered this petition in some detail not only because the demands and criticisms in it were to be the prototype for the future but also because it showed that even at this stage leading Indians were distressed at their own position and had given much thought to the problems of government. It finally dispels the popular English belief that Indian political thought began with the foundation of the Congress in 1885. The Bombay petition did not meet with much immediate success, but it created a considerable stir in London, where an India Reform Society, with which John Bright was associated, was set up to press the Indian case. It is important to remember that the petitioners did not regard themselves as being in any way in opposition to the British Government, and in 1855, when a patriotic fund was inaugurated in support of the Crimean war, Dadabhai Naoroji, the leading spirit in the Bombay Association, was the principal speaker on behalf of the fund. He took the opportunity of reaffirming that the interests of India were bound up with those of England. These early patriots nearly always assumed that Britain could be trusted to act fairly once the relevant facts were forced on her notice. She would not look for grievances, but would remedy them when compelled to observe them. Agitation was thus the correct Indian technique, and it was in this belief that the first generation of Indian politicians grew up.

Many authorities, British as well as Indian, have regarded the Mutiny as a great national uprising. On that view it should be discussed at this stage in our study of the growth of nationalism. The present writer, for reasons which have been stated in an earlier chapter, does not regard the Mutiny primarily as a ‘nationalist’ movement, and he is fortified in his opinion by the publicly expressed sentiments of those who were leading the new political movement. On the outbreak of the Mutiny the British Indian Association passed a resolution expressing disgust and horror at the outbreak, and trusting that it would meet with ‘no sympathy, countenance or support from the bulk of the civil population’, and a similar resolution was passed by the Muhammadan Association of Calcutta. Bengal indeed held almost entirely aloof from the Mutiny. The Bombay attitude was expressed by Dadabhai Naoroji nearly forty years later. As a member of the Royal Commission on India Expenditure, in a note which was very critical of the British Government, Dadabhai stated with regard to the Mutiny that ‘the causes were the mistakes and mismanagements of the British people’s own authorities; the people in India not only had no share in it but were actually ready at the call of the authorities to rise and support them’. This evidence from a great Indian patriot, a leader of Indian opinion when the Mutiny occurred, must surely be considered conclusive, and justifies the writer in not treating the Mutiny as a matter which need be discussed in this chapter on the growth of nationalism. It nevertheless gave a great stimulus to that movement. In the first place it ushered in an era of estrangement between the British and Indian peoples. Mutual suspicion destroyed natural contacts for a time, and Indians, therefore, had to depend on political organisations if their views and wishes were to be known by the authorities. At the same time the transfer of power to the Crown in 1858 was accompanied by a royal proclamation of the utmost importance to Indian aspirations. ‘It is our further will,’ wrote the proclamation, ‘that so far as may be, our subjects of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to office in our services, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge’. By the end of the century, partly because of British dilatoriness in carrying out this promise, Indians had become cynical about the proclamation, but to the men of the time it was indeed a charter of hope.

Indian political developments now began to receive a fresh stimulus from the visits of Indians to England for business or education. Those visits brought India into closer contact with Western liberal thought, and made her more fully aware of the great movement for national liberation which was so important a feature in nineteenth-century Europe. The Italian Risorgimento, and at a later stage the Irish Home Rule Movement, were to count for much in the minds and hearts of Indian leaders, and for a time the name of Mazzini exercised a magic spell over the youth of Bengal.

The most important of the early Bombay travellers to England was Dadabhai Naoroji, who went in 1855 to join the first Indian business firm established in London, that of the Camas. Dadabhai was to spend many years in England and eventually to become a Member of Parliament, but it was his first visit there that really influenced him and that fixed once and for all his belief that Britain could be trusted to do India justice and that the British at home were more progressive and more understanding than the British in India. His biographer, R. P. Masani, himself a true Indian patriot, tells us that ‘Dadabhai returned to India, his mind more enriched than his pocket. To have lived in England for three years during that era was itself a liberal education. It was a time when such great figures as Gladstone, Cobden and Bright were breathing a new spirit of liberalism into British politics, such authors as Herbert Spencer, Mill and Carlyle were revolutionising society with new theories of social reconstruction. In such an atmosphere Dadabhai realised vividly the contrast between the social, political and economic condition of the people of the west and that of his own countrymen. Where could he have studied political theory, the working of democratic institutions, the parliamentary system of government better than in the country universally recognised as the “mother of parliaments”? What indeed could have been a better school for the study of international commerce, banking and currency than London, the heart, the brain, the nerve centre of the British Empire?’

Dadabhai’s moral courage and clarity of thought soon made him a kind of unofficial ambassador, interpreting the two countries to each other, and his addresses to the newly formed East India Association in London did much to make English people realise that educated Indians were far from satisfied. He emphasised particularly their exclusion from the superior services: ‘Either the educated natives should have proper fields for their talents and education open to them in the various departments in the administration of the country, or the rulers must make up their minds, and candidly avow it, to rule the country with a rod of iron.’ On his return to India in 1869 he avowed the attainment of a parliament in India as being the goal of all patriotic Indians; and urged that they must have in England a proper organisation which could in due course ‘fight the last and greatest battle of representation’. This, it must be remembered, was said sixteen years before the foundation of the Indian National Congress.

Calcutta, too, began to send its quota of able young men to England for higher education; some to study law, and from 1868 onwards some to sit for the Indian Civil Service. On their return to India, things were not easy for them, for the Hindu prejudice against those who crossed the seas was still strong. Surendranath Banerjea, later to become the political leader of Bengal, gives in A Nation in the Making a graphic account of the difficulties of his homecoming in 1871: ‘All three of us (Romesh Chunder Dutt, Behani Lal Gupta and myself) stayed in our homes, and the Hindoo Patriot, the leading Hindu journal of the time, edited by Kristo Das Pal, announced that we had been received back into the bosom of our homes and Hindu society. It was a bold step for my mother and my brothers to have given me a place in a Brahmin family, and to have eaten and drunk and lived with me. My father was by no means orthodox in his ways, and his transgressions against strict orthodoxy were numerous and grave; but a visit to England was not one of them. . . . A visit to England was a new form of heterodoxy to which our society had not yet become accustomed. . . . The leaders indeed applauded the courage of the members of my family in taking me back into the old home, but the whole attitude of Hindu society, of the rank and file, was one of unqualified disapproval. My family was practically outcasted. We were among the highest of Brahmins; but those who used to eat and drink with us on ceremonial occasions stopped all intercourse and refused to invite us. There were some, who, jealous of my father’s fame and of my recent success, took advantage of this opportunity to settle old scores.’

These young men came back with a new understanding of political principles and organisation. Surendranath Banerjea tells us that in 1875 the students of Bengal were still indifferent to politics. The great problem was how to create in them a sober interest in public affairs and yet to protect them from fanaticism. To this end he joined with another ‘England-returned man’, Ananda Mohan Bose, in organising a students’ association and lectured on such subjects as ‘Indian Unity’, ‘Higher Education’ and ‘The Life of Mazzini’. Mazzini, with his lofty conception of a united Italy, had made a deep impression on the minds of English-educated Bengalis. Surendranath set himself to teach the true meaning of the doctrines of Mazzini, stripped of the revolutionary element in them.

Surendranath Banerjea and Ananda Mohan Bose now applied their minds to the political organisation of Bengal. The British Indian Association was not sufficiently dynamic or sufficiently popular for their purpose, for it was, in fact, a conservative body controlled by elderly gentlemen. A new body, known as the India League, had just been founded, but it, too, seemed inadequate, and on the 26th July 1876 yet another new organisation, known as the Indian Association, was established. The name Bengal Association was suggested and rejected, for the new association was meant to be the centre of an all-India movement. Its aims were, firstly, the creation of a strong body of public opinion; secondly, the unification of the Indian people on the basis of common political aspirations; and, thirdly, the promotion of friendly feelings between Hindus and Muslims. It quickly became the focal point of educated Bengali opinion, and within a year of its foundation its value was put to the test. The reduction of the age limit for the open competitive examination for the Indian Civil Service from twenty-one to nineteen years in 1879¹⁴ was regarded as a deliberate attempt to ‘blast the prospects of Indian candidates’, and a huge demonstration against this change was organised in Calcutta by the Indian Association. The true aim of the agitators, according to its principle organiser, Surendranath Banerjea, was ‘the awakening of a spirit of unity and solidarity among the people of India’. In 1877 Surendranath was, therefore, deputed to visit the other provinces, collecting subscriptions and stirring up public feeling. His tour, which was extensive and lasted many months, was successful not only in arousing Indian opinion regarding the civil services but also in establishing Bengal as the leading province of political India. Lal Mohan Ghose was then sent to England with the Civil Service Memorial. He secured the interest of John Bright, but did not succeed in his main object. Some part of the Indian claim was indeed met by the creation of a statutory civil service intended to give Indians a share in superior administrative posts. That change, however, had been decided on in principle some years before the Civil Service Memorial.

All these activities provided young English-educated Indians with a training in political technique. The Vernacular Press Act and the Arms Act, both of which were generally regarded as a serious encroachment on freedom as expounded by British liberal writers, were bitterly resented, and gave the Indian Association and other similar bodies a good opportunity of securing increased public support. They also strengthened the new habit of holding meetings and demonstrations.

Up to this time these political movements mainly affected the Western-educated classes, but in 1883 an incident occurred in Calcutta which aroused indignation amongst orthodox Hindus everywhere. It was alleged that a certain British High Court judge had insisted on the production in court of a stone idol for identification. This was contrary to previous usage, and was at once denounced in no measured terms by Surendranath Banerjea. He asked: ‘What are we to think of a judge who is so ignorant of the feelings of the people and so disrespectful of their most cherished convictions, as to drag into Court, and then to inspect, an object of worship which only Brahmins are allowed to approach, after purifying themselves according to the forms of their religion?’

This outburst was naturally treated as contempt of court, and Surendranath Banerjea was sent to jail. The sentence aroused great resentment, and his release was the signal for a large-scale popular demonstration, which symbolised the accession to the political movement of new classes of supporters.

We have now almost reached the end of what may be described as the early phase of political organisation. The Ilbert Bill controversy which closed that phase can be more conveniently considered in a later chapter. The ground had now been prepared for a more effective national organisation which would appeal not only to the English-educated and to the heterodox, but to the Indian gentry of the old school and in due course to the masses. The Indian National Congress was about to usher in a new epoch of Indian history, and from this stage onwards the history of Indian nationalism is the history of Indian political parties and in particular of the Congress and the Muslim League.

Chapter XXVII

The Battle for the Freedom of the Press

The first members of the Congress Party were few in number and consisted mainly of a very special cross-section of society. It is unlikely that they could have seriously influenced general Indian thought or laid the foundations of a true nationalist movement if there had not existed a strong independent Press devoted largely to political matters. The Press was, indeed, the principal medium through which Western ideas of freedom and democracy permeated the minds of the middle classes, and it may be justly regarded as one of the greatest British contributions to Indian national development. This contribution was made almost entirely by non-officials, often against strong opposition from the British Indian bureaucracy.

The rudiments of the Press may be seen in the organisations of news writers under the Mughal Empire. The necessity for accurate information regarding events and rumours, which every ruler must feel, was reinforced by the constant suspicion entertained by the Mughal emperors towards their viceroys and principal officers. A chief reporter or waqia navis was stationed at every great city for the purpose of reporting to the emperor on all local happenings as well as on current talk. The reports were strictly private and the reporters were therefore encouraged to write quite freely. After a time great nobles began to make use of a similar intelligence system, and, as a particular writer might often be employed by more than one noble, something rather like the news letters of England between the two wars came into being. In the Ain-i-Akbari we are told of a great noble, Khan Khanan Mirza Abdurrahim, that ‘he used to get daily reports from his newswriters whom he had posted at various stations. He read their reports at night and tore them up’.

At least one Muslim annalist tells us that private news sheets of this kind circulated amongst the soldiers, and that they were allowed considerable freedom of comment. Such manuscript news sheets were not unknown in Upper India towards the end of the eighteenth century, but we know little as to their nature or the degree of freedom they enjoyed. Printing was uncommon in India before the British period, and it is perhaps unlikely that the manuscript news sheets were widely known or very influential. They can scarcely be regarded as the foundation of a popular Press.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries governments in England generally regarded the Press with dislike and suspicion, and made numerous attempts to discourage it and to limit its activities. Reasonable freedom of writing and of speech outside Parliament had not yet been recognised as a fundamental right, and indeed as late as 1801 Cobbett was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for denouncing the flogging of British militia men by German mercenaries. The authorities were still unduly fearful of the subversive affects of criticism of their activities, and tended to identify extra-parliamentary opposition with sedition. It was scarcely to be expected that the East India Company should in this matter be more enlightened than the home authorities; and when newspapers began to circulate in India, many of the Company’s principal servants regarded them as at best useless and at worst dangerous.

Apart from the general illiberality of the times, three main factors were responsible for this attitude. The first was the constant insecurity of the Company’s position in India until after the time of Wellesley and this was of particular importance in as much as a great deal of the attention of the early British newspapers was concentrated on military affairs. The continued existence of the Company depended to a considerable extent on the support of the Indian Army, and an alien government so placed could not run the risk of tolerating public criticism of a kind which might shake the loyalty or undermine the confidence of that army. Even men like Elphinstone and Munro, liberal-minded and wholly devoted to the advancement of India, regarded a free Press as dangerous. As late as 1832 Elphinstone declared that ‘in other countries the use of the Press has extended along with the improvement of the country and the intelligence of the people, but in India we shall have to contend at once with the more refined theories of Europe and with the prejudices and fanaticisms of Asia, both rendered doubly formidable by the ignorance of those to whom the appeal will be addressed.’ Munro had stated even more emphatically that ‘a free Press and a dominion of strangers are things which are quite incompatible and which cannot long exist together’.

When such views were held on rational grounds by exceptionally enlightened administrators, it is not surprising that in the minds of lesser men they hardened into immovable prejudices. Indeed the second factor in determining the Company’s attitude to the Press was the authoritarian cast of mind which quickly became a characteristic of British administration in India. The vast power exercised by individual Englishmen over wide tracts of territory and large numbers of men frequently bred a sense of infallibility and led to resentment of public criticism. This factor, moreover, often operated most strongly in the minds of the best of the Company’s servants. The more humane and conscientious the official, the greater might be his impatience with an uninformed or self-seeking opposition to what, he believed, was for the good of the people. The self-confidence and consciousness of integrity which make a good District Officer, even in modern times, readily produce a narrow certainty of being right—and the resulting impatience of criticism is then rationalised into a belief that those concerned are too ignorant to judge and must not therefore be exposed to the dangerous propaganda of the critics. The psychology of this process will be familiar to everybody—and the writer does not exempt himself—who has ever exercised this kind of power and must always be remembered in our study of British India.

A third element in the problem was the general attitude of the Company’s servants to all outsiders. Because of its own monopolistic character, aided by the rule which required every Englishman not in the Company’s service to take out a licence if he wished to reside in India, all such outsiders were regarded as intruders, tolerated as long as they were not a nuisance. It was unthinkable that they should claim the right to criticise the Company’s policy. Yet these were the very people who towards the end of the eighteenth century began to found newspapers in India. For the battle for the liberty of the Press in India was not, as might have been expected, fought by Indians in defence of their own freedom. It was rather a struggle between non-official Englishmen and the Company, and the scales were so strongly weighted in favour of authority that the independents would have had no chance but for the intervention of three broad-minded and far-seeing Governors-General. Their task, like that of some of their liberal-minded successors, was made more difficult by reason of the irresponsibility of some of the early publications.

In 1767 the first attempt at starting a newspaper in India was forestalled by the simple expedient of deporting the author of the enterprise, but in 1780 James Hicky (not to be confused with William Hickey, author of the Memoirs) founded the Bengal Gazette. He apparently secured the approval of the authorities, though there was, in fact, no law requiring such approval at the time. His paper, described as ‘a weekly political and commercial paper open to all parties but influenced by none’ soon proved to be a publication of a very low order, which throve mainly on scurrilous attacks on individuals. The ancient method of ridicule was freely employed, and missionaries, officials, the Chief Justice, the Governor-General and his wife were all in turn attacked. The only action taken against the Bengal Gazette for some time, in spite of complaints from many quarters, was the withdrawal of the right to circulate it by post. In 1782, libel cases brought against Hicky by a missionary and by the Governor-General resulted in his imprisonment and, shortly afterwards, in the discontinuance of the Bengal Gazette. Five more papers were established in Calcutta between 1780 and 1785, one of which, the Calcutta Gazette, secured official patronage in the form of being authorised to publish the orders of the Governor-General in Council. One of these papers, the Bengal Journal, subsequently came under the editorship of William Duane, who quickly got into trouble with the authorities. His initial offence was that he published a rumour that Lord Cornwallis was dead and attributed it to ‘a certain distinguished Frenchman’. Lord Cornwallis was at that time most anxious not to be embroiled with the French, and it was presumably for this reason that he took what appeared to be a very disproportionate view of the magnitude of the offence. He decided to deport Duane, but the Supreme Court interfered on technical grounds. A few months later, Sir John Shore, who had succeeded Lord Cornwallis, had Duane deported. This incident is of importance solely because it shows what a stranglehold over the Press was provided by the power to deport any person who was not a native of India. Leicester Stanhope, writing in 1823 of the censorship established by Wellesley, stated that ‘previous to the establishment of a censor of the Press by Lord Wellesley, the people of India had the same liberty to write as to breathe and to live. No law forbade it’. It is true that no law restricted the theoretical liberty of the Press, but the threat of deportation was in practice a most effective and, indeed, drastic means of control.

The Press in Madras dates from 1785, when the weekly Madras Courier was established with official approval. It was allowed free postal facilities and was treated as the official organ for the publication of the orders of the Madras Government. It is interesting to note that its four pages included one page of Indian news and letters to the editor, and two pages of extracts from the English home papers; this last item being an important element in all the newspapers of the time in India. Other papers soon appeared in Madras, one of them being an ‘unauthorised’ paper known as the India Herald. This journal was said to contain several libels on the Madras Government, and the Governor accordingly ordered that the editor, Mr. Humphreys, be deported to England.

The first Bombay paper appeared in 1789. Within two years the Bombay Gazette criticised the local police administration, and the editor was accordingly directed to submit every issue for censorship. This, however, did not prevent the Bombay Gazette from becoming the official organ for the publication of the Bombay Government’s orders. According to Margarita Barns, who has studied this subject with some care, the Press at that time contained, apart from parliamentary reports, ‘editorials on subjects of interest to the resident Briton; on events in England, or the army, or the reported plans of Indian rulers. In addition to this type of information, we find newsletters and reports from Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, Madrid, China, Rio de Janeiro, and other centres of interest’, as well as ‘letters to the editor, government orders, personal news, Poets Corners, advertisements and even fashion notes’. It was, in fact, following the normal lines of development and was clearly intended for English people rather than for Indians.

Although the fear of deportation had been ever present in the minds of editors alike in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, interference with their activities was rare. A more rigid censorship, however, was at hand. Its immediate cause was an article in the Asiatic Mirror comparing the strength of the Europeans in India with that of the native population. The article was written at a time when Wellesley was in the midst of his campaigns against Tipu Sultan and acutely conscious of his deficiency in manpower. He had himself estimated his military needs at thirty thousand men, of which he had little more than ten thousand ready for action. This revelation of his dangerous weakness in the Press would have been exasperating to any Governor-General, but to a man of Wellesley’s imperious nature it was intolerable. He at once informed the commander-in-chief of his intention of ‘transmitting rules to the whole tribe of editors’, and directed the commander-in-chief to deport them in the meantime if necessary. In less than a month Wellesley issued a regulation imposing censorship on all Calcutta newspapers and directing the censors ‘to prevent the publication of all observations on the state of public credit or the revenues or the finances of the company’, as well as ‘all observations with respect to the conduct of the government or any of its officers, civil or military, marine, commercial or judicial’. Similar regulations had already been introduced in Bombay and Madras.

These regulations were rigorously enforced, the Baptist missionaries at Serampur were refused permission to establish a press, and Wellesley even considered starting a Government newspaper as a means of driving the private Press out of existence. Of this he declared that it served ‘only to maintain in needy indolence a few European adventurers, who are found unfit to engage in any creditable method of subsistence’.

For twenty years this harsh régime continued, until the liberal-minded Lord Hastings, convinced that ‘it is salutary for supreme authority even when its intentions are most pure, to look for the control of public scrutiny’, abolished the regulation requiring pre-censorship, in spite of the opposition of his principal officials and of the Court of Directors. He was helped in this matter by the discovery that the regulation, if applied to natives in Calcutta, would be ultra vires of the Governor-General in Council. It was accordingly abolished in August 1818, though editors were directed to abstain from animadversions on the measures and proceedings of the Honourable Court of Directors . . . or disquisitions on political transactions of the local administrations, and from certain other matters. Neither of these directions had any legal validity, but in the case of European editors the power to deport them to England still existed, and the practical effect of the change was to transfer the responsibility for avoiding publication of objectionable matter from the censor to the editor. It was, however, intended to give greater freedom to the Press, and this was, in fact, the result.

Some of the Company’s most important officials were in complete disagreement with the new policy, and Leicester Stanhope tells us that when he, together with other inhabitants of Madras, held a meeting to thank Lord Hastings for his liberality, the Madras censor ‘refused to allow the proceedings to appear and every effort was made to prevent the address from being signed’. It was, however, signed by the Chief Justice and other eminent persons. The opponents to the free Press were soon given another chance. James Silk Buckingham, a man of considerable ability and public spirit, assumed the editorship of the Calcutta Journal and before long began to tilt at the Government. As an advocate of the abolition of the Company’s monopoly, he was likely, in any case, to be regarded with disfavour, but probability was turned into certainty when he referred to the extension of the term of office of the Governor of Madras as a ‘public calamity’. He was warned that if he again violated the ‘laws of moral candour and essential justice’ he would be deported, to which he, not unreasonably, replied that ‘as to such laws he knew not where to look for such standards’. In 1822 he exposed a shameful example of official plurality, and a little later he attacked the so-called Regulation of 1818. ‘In point of fact and in point of law,’ he wrote, ‘the restrictions of June 1818 are mere wastepaper. They had never been passed into regulation in the only legal manner in which regulations can acquire a force of law by the sanction of the Supreme Court; and are of no more force or value than would be a circular of the Governor-General in Council demanding us to give up our residences for the accommodation of the King of Oudh if he were to visit Calcutta, or to give up our beds to his seraglio and our table to his servants.’

The Chief Secretary, Adam, who had never approved of the Press policy of Lord Hastings, was officiating as Governor-General in 1823, and at once decided to deport Buckingham. His Minute, quoted by Margarita Barns, sets out clearly the ground of his notice. ‘The Governor-General’s objection was, as on a former occasion, to the assumption by an editor of a newspaper of the privilege of sitting in judgment on the acts of Government and bringing public measures and the conduct of public men as well as the conduct of private individuals, before the tribunal of what Buckingham and his associates miscall public opinion. . . . He (the Governor-General) protests against the assumption of this right of control over the Government and its officers by a community constituted like the European Society of India. He denies the existence of such a right in that body and he maintains that it never can be exercised with efficiency for the professed purpose or with any other consequence, than weakening the just and necessary authority of government and introducing the worst spirit of party animosity and violence into this society through the agency of a licentious press.’

This action was soon followed by orders reintroducing the system of licensing of the Press in Calcutta, and in 1825 Bombay followed suit. The orders remained in force for ten years, though they were (except in one instance) administered liberally by Lord Bentinck, who was indeed contemplating their revision when ill health led him to resign. Sir Charles Metcalfe, who then officiated as Governor-General, held strong views on this subject, and in collaboration with Macaulay repealed the licensing regulations in 1835. He held that ‘if India could be preserved as a part of the British Empire only by keeping its inhabitants in a state of ignorance, our domination would be a curse to the country and ought to cease’. Metcalfe was indeed a shining example of the progressive attitude of some of the ablest of the Company’s officers, in contrast to the obscurantism of the mediocrities, and Kaye’s account of his life deserves study by all interested in the conflict between the two schools of thought in British India.

The home authorities disapproved of Metcalfe’s action, but did not think it politic to revoke it, and the freedom of the Press thus became an accepted fact. It will be noted that the struggle for that freedom was conducted not by Indians but by British editors. Important sections of the British Press in India had behaved irresponsibly, and so played into the hands of the restrictionists, but by the middle of the century there was a gradual improvement, and the Bombay Times, founded in 1838 and later to become the Times of India, set an altogether new tone. The racial bitterness evoked by the Ilbert Bill gave a setback to this improvement, but with that exception, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards the British Press in India displayed a considerable sense of responsibility and justified its freedom.

Papers such as the Times of India, The Statesman, The Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette, which grew up in the second half of the century, had a sound and restraining influence on both European and Indian thought. They played a great part in the political education of the Indian middle classes and along with such Indian-owned English papers as The Hindu of Madras and The Leader of Allahabad established a firm tradition of journalistic integrity and propriety.

In the meantime a strong Indian-owned Press, both in English and in the vernaculars, had grown up. If we ignore the three Persian journals founded at the end of the eighteenth century, which were soon discontinued, the credit for starting the first vernacular newspapers must go to the Baptist missionaries of Serampur in Bengal. Their first journalistic activities consisted of religious pamphlets in several languages. Although these works were technically non-political, they frequently embarrassed the authorities by reason of their blunt and sometimes narrow comments on Hindu and Muslim beliefs and practices. In 1818 the missionaries began to publish a Bengali monthly magazine, and, with the approval of Lord Hastings, a Bengali weekly, the Samachar Darpan, which was subsequently used by the Government for the publication of Bengali translations of official orders. In 1821 the many controversial statements on religious topics in this journal induced Raja Rammohan Roy to establish the Sambad Kaumudi, devoted largely to contradicting the views and statements of the missionaries. Two Persian papers next made their appearance, while in Bombay the first Gujarati paper, the Bombay Samachar, came into being. A Hindi paper followed and got into financial difficulties chiefly because there were few readers of Hindi in Calcutta, where it was published; and the postage to the United Provinces where it might have been popular, was too heavy.

The vernacular papers at this time dealt mainly with ‘notices of shipping, prices current, appointments, police reports, proceedings in the Supreme Court and descriptions of suttees’. The campaign of Rammohan Roy and others against suttee and the prohibition of the practice by Lord Bentinck produced much discussion of the subject in the Press, and so gave a great fillip to vernacular journalism, particularly in Bengal. In 1839 there were nine Indian newspapers in Calcutta and four in Bombay. Madras was strangely behind, and does not seem to have had any vernacular newspapers at that time.

Steady progress continued, but during the Mutiny important sections of both the British and the Indian Press displayed lamentable irresponsibility. English newspapers in India exuded hatred and clamoured for revenge, while Indian journals, according to Lord Canning, ‘sedulously, cleverly, artfully’ poured forth sedition and mendacity. Restrictions had to be imposed, but they were withdrawn a year later when that emergency was over.

After the immediate effects of the Mutiny had disappeared, interest in politics and journalism revived. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, a consistent supporter of the nationalist movement, and still one of the most influential papers in India, was launched in 1868, and by 1873 there were thirty-eight Indian-owned newspapers in Bengal, most of which were in Bengali. One enumeration a little later showed sixty-two Indian language papers in the Bombay Presidency and nineteen in Madras. After the assassination of Lord Mayo, a period of irresponsibility seems to have set in, and certain vernacular journals were so extreme and inflammatory that there was some justification for the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, by which Lord Lytton sought to remedy the situation. The Act applied only to the vernacular Press, and to escape its mischief the Amrita Bazar Patrika, which had hitherto been issued partly in Bengali, switched over to English almost overnight. At the same time, The Hindu, generally regarded today as the best-written and best-edited newspaper in India, came into being.

In 1882 Lord Ripon repealed the Vernacular Press Act, and until Bengal terrorism necessitated special legislation the Press of India was, in the fullest sense, free. That freedom had been won in the first place by the doggedness of a few British non-officials and retained, in spite of interruptions, because of the tolerance and vision of three Governors-General. The names of Lord Hastings, Sir Charles Metcalfe and Lord Ripon deserve honourable mention in this chapter, which can fittingly be brought to a close with the judgment of a distinguished Calcutta journalist, Sir Alfred Watson. ‘If,’ says Sir Alfred, ‘one judged the control of the Indian Press by the letter of the laws under which it is produced one might say that it was not a free Press, but in my personal experience during my years in India I can say that no Press in the world enjoyed such latitude in the expression of opinion, and over a large field none so flagrantly abused its freedom.’

Chapter XXVIII

The Deterioration of Relations

By the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century India was equipped for a new stage of political development. Her leading men had learned the elements of political organisation, and they had at their disposal an influential and competent Indian Press. They had, moreover, grown out of the Anglophile habit of mind which was so common earlier in the century. The supreme faith in the just intentions of Britain which characterised men like Raja Rammohan Roy and Dadabhai Naoroji, though a great testimonial to England, could scarcely have generated a true nationalist movement. The real impetus came when thinking Indians, while still conscious of the good Britain had done, began to put more emphasis on her short-comings and to be impatient of the slow rate of political progress.

Two developments made this new approach possible. The first of these was the general deterioration of relations between Englishmen and Indians in and after the middle of the century, while the second was the Indian reaction against the earlier glorification of Western ideals and institutions.

In the early days of the Company’s rule there had been little that could be called a racial cleavage between the Indian gentry and the Company’s servants. There had, indeed, been the same wide gulf as in former Indian empires between the ruling classes and the mass of the people, but the English officials mixed on easy terms with Indians of good class and education. Undisputed power, however, soon began to exercise its corrupting influence, and a certain stiffness grew up in the manner of English officials. Early in 1824 Lord Hastings complained of this tendency, and took steps to check it. ‘A conception had been entertained,’ he stated, ‘that a reserved manner and a tone of dictation would impress them with a notion of our power. . . . I therefore pointedly enjoined the strictest observance of polite and unassuming demeanour on the part of our functionaries towards the rulers, with courtesy towards the better classes and kindness of manner towards the lower.’

Unfortunately, sympathy and the desire to keep contact cannot be commanded, and the tendency to aloofness increased as the power of the Company grew. This aloofness was, indeed, the complaint most frequently made by Indian leaders in the middle of the century, and it was to some extent substantiated by the failure of most civil and military officials to foresee the Mutiny. Sir Sayyid Ahmad, the greatest Indian Muslim leader in the nineteenth century, declared as early as 1858 that the lack of contact between the Government and people was a prime cause of the Mutiny. ‘The Government could never know the inadvisability of the laws and regulations which it passed. It could never hear the voice of the people on such a subject. . . . But the greatest mischief lay in this, that the people misunderstood the views and intentions of Government. . . . There was no real communication between the governors and the governed, no living together or near one another as has always been the custom of the Muhammadans in countries which they subjected to their rule.’ Worse still, Sir Sayid went on to say, ‘In the first years of the British rule in India, the people were heartily in favour of it. This good feeling the Government has now forfeited, and the natives very generally say that they are treated with contempt. . . . The opinion of many of the officials is that “no native can be a gentleman.”’ These are the views of a contemporary observer, renowned for sanity and sober judgment and a firm advocate of unwavering loyalty to Britain.

It was inevitable that the Mutiny, with its sorry tale of massacres and reprisals, should engender bitterness and widen the gulf between Englishmen and Indians. Unfortunately, after the appalling strain imposed upon them, many of the English community lost their balance in the hour of triumph and clamoured indiscriminately for vengeance. Government by the Crown thus began in an atmosphere of hatred and suspicion. Friendships between Englishmen and Indians were in many cases dissolved and the two communities became estranged—a process which to a lesser extent was repeated in the days of the terrorist and civil disobedience movements in Bengal seventy years later.

The Queen’s proclamation of 1858 was couched in noble and generous language. It promised that all British subjects, of whatever race or creed, should be freely admitted to the public services; it recognised Britain’s obligation to India; and it declared that ‘their prosperity will be our strength, and their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward’. It deeply touched the hearts of educated Indians, and might have been the starting point of a new era in Anglo-British relations. Unfortunately, the memories left by the Mutiny were too bitter to permit of a generous interpretation of the proclamation, and the suspicion which had taken deep root in many English minds endured for a generation.

As the years passed, educated Indians grew continually more resentful of their practical exclusion from important offices and less disposed to entertain friendly feelings towards those who seemed to be keeping them from their birthright. British officials, on the other hand, entrenched in unshakable power, grew ever more class-conscious and on their guard against intruders; while British business men, as a rule less highly educated than their contemporaries in the Civil Service, frankly regarded Indians as natural inferiors, whatever their intellectual attainments might be.

There were, of course, exceptions. The founder of the Indian National Congress, Hume, was indeed an Indian civil servant, while the fourth president of that body was a British business man, George Yule. These individual cases, however, only emphasised the general rule. The position was not made any easier by the change in the domestic pattern of Anglo-Indian life. Sea communications between England and India had become easy and rapid, and English women in increasing numbers came out to marry and to live in India. This made the Englishman, whether an official or a business man, much less dependent than formerly on the social resources of the country, and henceforth he tended to build up an exclusive English colony wherever he went. Some authorities have asserted that women are more prone to race prejudice than men and that the presence of large numbers of Englishwomen in India has been an unfortunate factor in this respect. Against this assertion is to be set the devoted work for India done by many Englishwomen, particularly in the country districts, where the Collector’s wife has often been the sole inspirer and organiser of welfare activities. It is perhaps neither necessary nor possible to strike a balance, and the writer is not prepared to go beyond the statement that in the second half of the nineteenth century Englishmen in India sought their relaxation in their homes or in their clubs rather than in Indian society, and so lost the contact which they had formerly had with Indian opinion. Matters were made worse by the unfortunate controversy over the Ilbert Bill in 1883. Up to that time no Indian magistrate outside the Presidency towns had been competent to try a European British subject. Under Lord Ripon’s direction, the law member, Courtney Ilbert, introduced a bill to remove this discrimination. The proposal was reasonable, particularly in view of the admission of Indians to superior judicial posts, but it greatly alarmed the planters and other British non-officials, and a violent agitation was set on foot against the Bill. British officials and lawyers soon joined in, and a violent campaign of propaganda compelled the Governor-General to give in and to agree to a compromise, by which European British subjects could claim trial by a jury, half of the members of which must be European or American. The British propaganda had called forth an equally violent counter-campaign, and the net result of the controversy was to inflame racial passions to a degree greater than had prevailed since the Mutiny.

The evidence as to the gulf between Englishmen and educated Indians at this time is strong. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who visited India in 1883 and made many Indian contacts, writes of ‘the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there and indigenous races’ and states categorically that ‘no hotel keeper in India dare receive a native guest into his house, not on account of any ill will of his own, but through fear of losing his custom’. He testified also to the refusal of Englishmen to let an Indian share a railway carriage with them; and with regard to one such incident reports Indian acquaintances as saying, ‘From this you will see how our ruling race treats us with scorn and contempt’, and that ‘such treatment is becoming general’. Blunt was in many ways a biased observer, and consorted only with politically minded intellectuals; but no less damning evidence is given by Sir Henry Cotton, himself of the third generation of an Indian Civil Service family. In his New India, written just before the foundation of the Indian National Congress and revised twenty years later, he testifies to the habitual contempt of many Englishmen for Indians and to the abuse sometimes heaped on the people of the country by English and low Indian journals. He has also much to say about the growing frequency of assault by Europeans upon Indians.

Much more evidence of the same kind could easily be quoted, but it is beyond reasonable doubt that in the quarter of the century after the Mutiny many Englishmen developed an intolerant and arrogant attitude towards educated Indians which would have shocked men of an earlier generation. Their feeling towards the ordinary cultivator was not affected by this change—perhaps because he was neither a rival for power nor yet politically conscious—and it became increasingly common for British officials, at any rate in Bengal, to say: ‘I like the peasant, he is a good fellow; but I do not like the babu.’ In any country, however, it is the educated classes who count in political development, and this new English attitude was greatly resented and so stimulated the growth of nationalism.

This analysis of the cleavage between the two communities is not meant to be a condemnation of English officials in the nineteenth century. The philosophic historian may well consider that a small body of foreigners can only hold sway over vast territories by keeping themselves aloof and brooking no equality with the subject people. As long, therefore, as self-government for India was indefinitely distant, the aloofness of the Englishman may have been based on an unconscious political wisdom; his failure to appreciate the spiritual awakening of India, which his own work had so largely produced, was for a time a source of strength; it left him able to rule because he took his ascendancy for granted. It led, however, to trouble in the long-drawn-out period of transition when the goal of self-government was near enough to inspire Indians with impatience, and it was the realisation of this danger ahead that led certain Englishmen to play an active part in the foundation of the Indian National Congress.

Chapter XXIX

The Indian National Congress: The First Twenty Years

In 1883 the Indian atmosphere was electric. As we have already seen, the Vernacular Press Act and the Arms Act had been bitterly resented by educated Indians, and the deadlock over the Ilbert Bill had deepened that resentment. The imprisonment of Surendranath Banerjea for contempt of court had aroused widespread sympathy in Calcutta, and on his release his attempts to raise a national fund ‘to secure the political advancement of the country by means of constitutional agitation in England and in India’ met with a remarkable response. Leading Indians now felt the need of a more comprehensive political organisation than any of the existing associations, and, accordingly, the Indian Association convened the first all-India conference in Calcutta from 28th to 30th December 1883.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who was a visitor at the conference, tells us that three-quarters of the hundred delegates were Bengalis; that on the whole it was ‘very provincial in its interests’, but that the most important items were an attack on the covenanted services and a general discussion on parliamentary government. He added that the speeches were good but the meetings were not well organised. The meetings were considered to have been a success, and a second Indian national conference was called in December 1885. Unfortunately it synchronised with an all-India meeting convened in Bombay by a new organisation, known initially as the Indian National Union, but soon designated the Indian National Congress.

This new body, which was to be by far the most important factor in Indian political life, owed its existence largely to the vision and determination of an Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, a retired member of the Indian Civil Service. Hume was an outstanding District Officer, who, after playing a gallant part in the Mutiny, devoted himself to what today would be called welfare activities. His independence and progressive ideas often brought him into conflict with authority—as when his establishment of free primary schools on the basis of a voluntary cess called forth a government circular objecting to the employment of unofficial Indian agencies in education; and in 1879 a disagreement with the Government led to his removal from the post of Secretary to the Government of India. Three years later he retired, but remained in India. He had long been acutely conscious of the existing unrest and of the need to canalise it for useful purposes, and in 1883 he issued a circular letter to Calcutta graduates calling on them to organise themselves for the good of the country. The importance of that document in Indian history justifies a somewhat lengthy quotation.

‘Whether in the individual or the nation,’ he wrote, ‘all vital progress must spring from within and it is to you, her most cultured and enlightened minds, her most favoured sons, that your country must look for the initiative. In vain may aliens, like myself, love India and her children, as well as the most loving of these; in vain may they, for her and their good, give time and trouble, money and thought; in vain may they struggle and sacrifice; they may assist with advice and suggestions; they may place their experience, abilities and knowledge at the disposal of the workers, but they lack the essential of nationality, and the real work must ever be done by the people of the country themselves.’

He went on to ask for fifty graduates to volunteer as founders of a new national movement, and he ended with what must surely be the most moving appeal ever addressed to any people by a foreigner.

‘As I said before, you are the salt of the land. And if amongst even you, the elite, fifty men cannot be found with sufficient power of self sacrifice, sufficient love for and pride in their country, sufficient genuine and unselfish heartfelt patriotism to take the initiative, and if needs be, devote the rest of their lives to the Cause—then there is no hope for India. Her sons must and will remain mere humble and helpless instruments in the hands of foreign rulers, for “they would be free, themselves must strike the blow”. And if even the leaders of thought are all either such poor creatures, or so selfishly wedded to personal concerns, that they dare not or will not strike a blow for their country’s sake, then justly and rightly are they kept down and trampled on, for they deserve nothing better. Every nation secures precisely as good a government as it merits. If you, the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, cannot, scorning personal ease and selfish objects, make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for yourselves and your country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of your own affairs, then we your friends are wrong, and our adversaries right; then are Lord Ripon’s noble aspirations for your good fruitless and visionary; then, at present, at any rate, all hopes of progress are at an end, and India truly neither lacks nor deserves any better government than she now enjoys. Only, if this be so, let us hear no more fractious, peevish complaints that you are kept in leading strings, and treated like children, for you will have proved yourselves such. Men know how to act. Let there be no more complaints of Englishmen being preferred to you in all important offices, for if you lack that public spirit, that highest form of altruistic devotion that leads men to subordinate private ease to the public weal, that true patriotism that has made Englishmen what they are—then rightly are these preferred to you, and rightly and inevitably have they become your rulers. And rulers and taskmasters they must continue, let the yoke gall your shoulders never so sorely, until you realise and stand prepared to act upon the eternal truth that, whether in the case of individuals or nations, self-sacrifice and unselfishness are the only unfailing guides to freedom and happiness.’

Such an appeal could scarcely fail to secure a response, and in 1884 leading men from the various provinces joined Hume in forming the Indian National Union, the only important function of which was to usher in the first Indian National Congress at Bombay in 1885. Delegates were to be ‘leading politicians well acquainted with the English language’, and the direct objects of the conference were to enable all the most earnest labourers in the cause of national progress to become personally known to each other, and to discuss and decide upon the political operations to be undertaken during the ensuing year. The manifesto also stated that indirectly the conference would form a germ of a national parliament.

Hume’s original intention had been for the Congress to discuss social rather than political matters, the latter being left to the existing associations in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. He had also proposed that the Governor of the Province in which the Congress met should be asked to preside over it so that it might form a direct link between the Government and the people. The Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, was consulted and disagreed with both these views. He considered it essential that the Congress should discuss political matters and ‘point out to the Government in what respects the administration was defective and how it could be improved’, and he was of the opinion that the presence of the Governor might deter members from speaking freely. Lord Dufferin’s opinion prevailed and the Congress thus embarked on political discussions with the full approval of the Government. Most of the seventy-two delegates at the first Congress were lawyers, journalists or schoolmasters, and in the absence of the aristocracy, the military classes and the agriculturists, and with only two Muslims present, the gathering could not be said to represent the nation. Loyalty to the British Crown was the keynote of the early Congress, and the President’s address at the inaugural meeting on 28th December 1885 ended with these sagacious words: ‘She, Great Britain, had given them order; she had given them railways, and above all she had given them the inestimable blessing of Western education. But a great deal still remains to be done. The more progress the people made in education and material prosperity, the greater would be their insight into political matters, the keener their desire for political advancement . . . their desire to be governed according to the ideas of government prevalent in Europe was in no way incompatible with their loyalty to the British Government. All they desired was that the basis of the government should be wide and people should have their proper and legitimate share in it.’ The subjects discussed were to prove the pattern for some years to come. The most important demands were the expansion of the Legislative Councils, simultaneous recruitment in England and India for the Indian Civil Service and the reimposition of the import duty on cotton. The proceedings were concluded with ‘Three times three cheers’ for Her Majesty the Queen, which evoked a great loyal demonstration.

Thus, with the blessing of the Viceroy, and under the inspiration of an English ex-civil servant, was born the movement which, in spite of many follies and errors, was to teach the people of India self-respect and patriotism and in the fullness of time to fit them for complete self-government.

For the first three years the attitude of official encouragement was maintained, but when the fourth congress was held in Allahabad in 1888 the organisers complained of official hostility, and indeed of obstacles placed in their way by the Indian Civil Service. Some Indian writers have attributed this to the difference in approach between the English noblemen who governed the Presidencies where the first three conferences were held and the Indian civil servants who ruled the lesser provinces. The real reason for the change lay perhaps deeper than this, and can be discovered from the lengthy correspondence between Hume and Sir Auckland Colvin, Governor of the United Provinces, on the methods adopted by the Congress. Hume had for long been profoundly disturbed by the appalling poverty in certain sections of the rural population: ‘Toil, toil, toil; hunger, hunger, hunger; sickness, suffering, sorrow; these alas! alas! are the keynotes of their short and sad existences.’ He was convinced that drastic governmental action in the matter of agrarian reform and otherwise was essential to cope with this problem, and he believed that such action would not be forthcoming until popular enthusiasm was generated and the public mind educated. He then issued pamphlets, held mass meetings, sent out lecturers and to some extent modelled Congress activities on the pattern of the Anti-Corn Law League in England. Sir Auckland Colvin, though by no means unsympathetic with the aims of Congress, and a frank supporter of the demand for the expansion of the legislative councils, regarded this public propaganda as fraught with grave danger. In his judgment India was not ready for this kind of political activity. Her people could not be expected to show the restraint which alone makes it possible for men to criticise their government freely without wishing to subvert the constitution. General propaganda was therefore premature. Hume, on the other hand, believed that so far from being premature, propaganda was in fact belated. ‘The Government,’ he stated in his speech at Allahabad, ‘has, broadly speaking, never realised the vast proportions of the coming flood which is being engendered by the noble policy of which in 1833 Lord Macaulay was so prominent an exponent; it is we of the Congress, who through good repute and ill repute, careless what men say of us if only haply God may bless our efforts, who standing between the country and the coming development, are labouring—labouring almost frantically—to provide in time channels through which this surging tide may flow, not to ravage and destroy but to fertilise and regenerate.’

Colvin and Hume were both able and sincere men who loved India, but their views were irreconcilable, and indeed from the moment that the Congress embarked on mass propaganda of this kind friction between it and officials was inevitable. In 1890 the Government of India issued a declaration of its attitude to the Congress Party in the following terms: ‘The Government of India recognise that the Congress movement is regarded as representing what would in Europe be called the advanced Liberal party, as distinguished from the great body of Conservative opinion which exists side by side with it. They desire themselves to maintain an attitude of neutrality in their relations to both parties, so long as these act strictly within their constitutional functions.’ The dealings of particular government officials with Congress naturally depended partly on their temperament, but friendly neutrality continued for a long time to be the general attitude of the Government, and not a few leading Congressmen were rewarded for their public work with high honours or official positions. Help continued to be received from individual Englishmen, though the Anglo-Indian Press was not always friendly. In 1888 a British business man, George Yule, presided over Congress, while in 1889 the principal speaker was the celebrated Bradlaugh. For twenty years the Congress pursued a moderate and even restrained course. The division between extremists and moderates had not arisen within it; and in spite of the militancy of Tilak, year by year its members were content patiently to reiterate resolutions on a few important subjects, confident that sooner or later Britain would do justice.

The greatest attention was naturally concentrated on the demand for constitutional changes. The second Congress in 1886 elaborated a scheme for an expansion of the legislative councils on the basis of fifty per cent elected strength. The Government was to be given the right of over-ruling the Councils, subject to an appeal to the standing committees of the British House of Commons. The ultimate authority of Parliament was at that time still unquestioned. In 1892 the Indian Councils Act went some way to meet the Congress claim, and in spite of criticism on points of detail it was loyally accepted. The subject was not seriously raised again until 1904. The second most important topic in the first twenty sessions was recruitment to the public services. The Congress attached great importance to the employment of an increasing number of Indians in superior posts and demanded that examinations for the Indian Civil Service be held in India as well as in Britain. Except in minor respects little was done to satisfy this demand, and it is impossible not to admire the patience shown by successive congresses in spite of continued disappointments.

Military affairs received attention from the start, and Congress consistently demanded a reduction of military expenditure, the establishment of military colleges and the admission of Indians into the commissioned ranks in the Army. They complained that military policy in India was settled purely in accordance with Britain’s imperial needs and that India, nevertheless, had to meet the bill.

Another subject which was to recur frequently was the separation of executive and judicial functions which the Congress regarded as vital to any real liberty. Economic matters were frequently discussed, and it began to be alleged that Indians were the victims of the colonial system. In the 1910 Congress C.Y. Chintamani, quoting another Congress leader, stated that ‘India had come to be regarded as a plantation of England, growing raw products to be shipped by British agents in British ships, to be worked into fabrics by British skill and capital, to be re-exported to India by British merchants in India through their British agents’. The excise duty on cotton goods manufactured in British India was naturally criticised on the ground that ‘the interests of India, had been sacrificed to those of Lancashire’.

These were the main topics of discussion, but far more important than any particular demands was the fact that the Congress was growing in knowledge and self-confidence, and was now more ready to demand the recognition of rights where it had formerly been content to plead for privileges. By the end of the twenty-year period a new note had crept into Indian political utterances, and many of the leaders found their patience wearing thin.

Chapter XXX

The Rise of Terrorism

We have already seen that Indian nationalism was the result of two distinct forces, of which one was an exaggerated respect for Western ideas, while the other was the reaction towards the ancient ways, of which Ramakrishna Paramahnsa and Dayanand Saraswati were the moving spirits. In the political aspect, too, Indian nationalism had a similar dualism. The men who founded the Congress and the earlier associations were, as a rule, men who had moved away from Hindu orthodoxy and who had more in common with English liberal thinkers than with men of their own faith. They sought to found not a Hindu kingdom but an Indian secular state, organised on Western lines and animated by Western ideas. From about 1894, however, a new element appeared. Resurgent Hinduism became an important factor in Indian nationalism, and the followers of Bal Gangadhar Tilak sought frankly to make it the foundation of the state. Brahmanism, which had with much subtlety and patience adapted itself first to the Muslim invasions, and then to the British conquest, again made a bid for supremacy. The struggle which then began between the secularists and the militant Hindus was to be a recurring motif throughout the period of progress towards independence, and, even after the transfer of power, was to be the cardinal issue of Indian politics. It manifests itself today in the conflicts between Pandit Nehru and the Hindu Mahasabha. It is important, therefore, to study its origins.

The founder of the militant school in modern Hindu politics was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Chitpavan Brahman, and, in order to understand even a little of the complex motives that actuated him, it is necessary to remember the place of the Chitpavans in history. According to an ancient Sanskrit legend, quoted by Grant Duff, the God Vishnu, in one of his earthly incarnations, reclaimed from the sea the country below the Western Ghats, known as the Konkan, and either in order to people the country with Brahmans, or, according to another version, because he needed the ceremonial services of some Brahmans, Vishnu breathed life into fourteen dead bodies that had been washed up by the sea, He thus created a new sect of Brahmans, known as Chitpavan or ‘purified’. They were not highly regarded by other Brahmans in ancient days and appeared to have been employed principally as spies and messengers. Early in the eighteenth century, however, the fortunes of the Chitpavans began to turn. The Chitpavan Balaji Visnanath Rao established himself as Peishwa or ruler of the Maratha territories and handed the position down to his son, who deposed the king and assumed the full powers of sovereignty. In the third generation the newcomers themselves were reduced to a position of helplessness, and the celebrated example of the Mayors of the Palace was once again followed. That very remarkable man, Nana Phadnavis, rapidly concentrated all power in his own hands, and, as he himself was a Chitpavan, soon every important office of state was filled by a member of that sect. Competent authorities like Grant Duff regarded the Chitpavans as the most intelligent of all Brahmans, and they showed such ability and ruthlessness in consolidating their power that ‘the Mahratta empire became essentially a Chitpavan empire’. Their hopes of establishing their rule over all India were shattered by the advent of the British, but they never abandoned their dream of empire, and cherished great, though secret, bitterness towards the race which had supplanted them.

Tilak, a Chitpavan of considerable erudition, great ability and dynamic energy, had his full share of this legacy of bitterness. His first important activity consisted of long-continued journalistic attacks on Mr. Justice Ranade, the founder of the social-reform movement and a firm believer in progress on Western lines. Tilak would have none of this and set himself to fight every kind of social reform that might interfere with the ancient ways of orthodox Hinduism. A dramatic opportunity soon occurred. One of the not infrequent cases of death of a Hindu child wife in Calcutta had come to official notice and led to the introduction of the Age of Consent Bill, which forbade consummation of a marriage until the wife was twelve years old. The Bengali Hindu Press violently opposed this Bill, but was soon outdone in virulence by Tilak’s vernacular paper, the Kesari. Not content with opposing the Bill, he denounced its Hindu supporters as traitors and carried on propaganda against it in schools and colleges, thus rapidly becoming the hero of the narrow orthodox party. He taught the necessity of militancy, he organised gymnastic societies in which they could train themselves to employ force against the enemies of their religion, and he connected his movements with one of the most popular of the Hindu deities, Ganesh, the god with the elephant head. The English were depicted as the monsters who sought to undermine the foundations of Hinduism, and every art which could stir up anti-British feeling was ruthlessly exploited. There was no limit to his capacity for hatred or to his determination to make India a land for the Hindus alone, and he next turned his attention to stirring up feeling against the Muslims. For this purpose he invoked the memory of Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha military greatness in the seventeenth century and a sworn enemy of the Mughals. His paper proved an admirable vehicle for the propagation of hatred, and in June 1897 it published a discussion of the treacherous murder of Afzal Khan by Shivaji. It will be remembered that when those two leaders met at a peace conference, Afzal Khan courteously leant towards his guest and gave Shivaji the opportunity to stab him with his ‘tiger’s claw’ or steel hook affixed to his hand.¹⁵ The professor who took part in the discussion made it abundantly clear that, by his act, Shivaji committed no sin. ‘Who dares call that man a murderer who, when only nine years old, had received Divine inspiration not to bow down before a Mohammedan Emperor? Who dares to condemn Shivaji for disregarding a minor duty in the performance of a major one?’ The authority of the Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the most venerated of Hindu religious works, was quoted in support of this view, and Tilak thus began that perversion of moral judgment which was to play such havoc in India a little later. The immediate occasion of this anti-Muslim propaganda was the Government order forbidding Hindu processions to play music in front of Muhammadan mosques, but its more permanent support came from an ‘anti-cow-killing society’ established by Tilak as part of his programme of India for the Hindus.

Another opportunity for the display of hatred was provided by the outbreak of plague in Western India in 1896. Government officers rightly insisted on segregation of those afflicted, and this inevitably meant some interference with domestic privacy. British officials superintended the work, and British soldiers provided the search parties. Every possible allegation was made against the individual Englishmen concerned, while the Government were again charged with a determination to undermine the Hindu religion. Again the name of Shivaji was invoked against the foreigner who was despoiling the country of its wealth. Let Shivaji again annihilate the wicked and establish swarajya (self-government), demanded the journalists. Shivaji did indeed awake, and two Chitpavan Brahmans, who had founded the ‘society for the removal of obstacles to the Hindu religion’, murdered two British officers in Poona who had been concerned in measures against plague. Tilak was sent to jail, but was released prematurely, amidst great public rejoicing, and at once renewed his activities.

Tilak was a dangerous and remarkable man, and his character ‘provides the key to much which the West finds it difficult to understand in later Indian political developments. The combination of great intellectual ability with almost primitive communal fanaticism; the existence of a thoroughly reactionary attitude towards social reform, side by side with the modern spirit of national revolution, and the ability to ignore the rights if not the existence, of other great communities containing many millions of people—these are phenomena with which every student of modern Indian politics is familiar’. He was in fact the complete antithesis of Mr. Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence. His influence was not confined to the Maratha country. The emotional Bengali soon began to regard Tilak as a national hero, and even Surendranath Banerjea, whose approach to politics was fundamentally different from that of Tilak, deeply deplored the Chitpavan’s imprisonment. ‘For Mr. Tilak,’ he said, ‘my heart is full of sympathy. My feelings go forth to him in his prison house. A nation is in tears.’

The cult of Shivaji was indeed unlikely to appeal to the people of Bengal, but for the purpose of the extremists its place could well be taken by that of Kali, the terrible goddess. From this time onwards, though it was some years before the militant section had any great influence inside the Congress itself, Indian nationalism has to be recognised as the product of two separate currents of feeling and thought—an occidental liberalism and a fiercely militant Hindu revivalism—which united to form a mighty and, indeed, irresistible river.

In spite of these developments, the attempts made in 1905 and 1906 to inaugurate a terrorist movement in Bengal failed, although unrest was rife in Calcutta and the militant party was greatly helped by the unpopularity of Lord Curzon’s régime as Viceroy. Few Viceroys have devoted such ability to the whole-hearted service of India or have achieved such great practical results. Lord Curzon reorganised and strengthened the administration, taught India the value of her ancient monuments, and made considerable reforms in university and secondary education. He took a firm stand against the recruitment of indentured Hindu labour for the Transvaal gold mines, and even according to the official history of the Congress the manly way in which he punished British regiments for attacks by individual soldiers on Indians, ‘remains as a tribute to his courage and sense of justice’. He was, nevertheless, felt to be unsympathetic; his University Bill was regarded with suspicion, his steps to control the Calcutta Corporation were resented, and his refusal, for understandable reasons, to receive a delegation from the Congress in 1904 was considered discourteous.

These factors, together with the growing impatience at the British delay in giving Indians a greater share in the superior services and in the Councils, were very soon fully exploited by Tilak’s two principal Bengali followers, Bepin Chandra Pal and Arabindo Ghose. In their speeches and in the newspapers which they respectively edited—New India and Bande Matram—they demanded ‘Arya for the Aryans’, they made their hostility to British rule abundantly clear, and they stirred up in Bengal a new militant spirit, partly religious and partly political in origin. This spirit soon took hold of the students, who formed themselves into gymnastic societies and combined physical with political training.

Bengal was thus already in a ferment when on 16th October 1905 its partition provided the extremists with a perfect war-cry to fire the emotions of Bengali Hindus. At that time Bengal, Bihar and Orissa formed one province with a population of seventy-eight million people, In East Bengal Muslims were in a majority, while Hindus greatly predominated in the West of Bengal as well as in Bihar and Orissa. The province was unwieldy, and some redivision of it was not only a part of Lord Curzon’s general policy of improving administrative efficiency but was also a genuine practical necessity. Various forms of partition were discussed. Lord Curzon and the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal consulted local leaders and discovered that the Hindus were bitterly opposed to any scheme which would subdivide Bengal. The impression, therefore, gained ground that the idea had been dropped, and when partition was actually effected it thus came as a bombshell. Eastern and Northern Bengal were combined with Assam into a new province, while West Bengal was left with Bihar and Orissa. In East Bengal and Assam Muslims were the predominant community, while in the western province Hindus were in an overwhelming majority. From the point of view of the East Bengal Muslims, partition had everything to commend it. It is generally admitted that East Bengal had long been neglected, and Valentine Chirol, writing five years after partition, reported that ‘they have already gained enormously by the change’.

Educated Calcutta Hindus, however, were inflamed almost to madness. They claimed that the Bengalis were a nation, and that this dichotomy was therefore unnatural and unjust, and they firmly believed that it was part of a Machiavellian plot on the part of Lord Curzon to break the growing influence of the Hindu intelligentsia. In the cold light of history it is easy to see that the accusation was groundless. In this and in most other things Curzon’s sole thought was efficiency, and the worst charge which could be brought against him would be that he cared more for scientific administration than for public feeling. Nevertheless the allegation was widely believed, and was indeed supported by Sir Henry Cotton. ‘It was no administrative reason that lay at the root of this scheme. It was part and parcel of Lord Curzon’s policy to enfeeble the growing power and destroy the political tendencies of a patriotic spirit. Bengalis are the leaders of political agitation in modern India. With all their faults, they are the principal section of the community which has inspired the future hope and destiny of their country. The consciousness and conviction that the partition was designed to weaken Bengalee influence induced the popular irritation on the subject.’

In spite of his great qualities and his sympathy with the people of Bengal, Sir Henry Cotton was often driven by his emotions into an unjudicial state of mind, and most authorities today would agree that in this matter he allowed prejudice to distort his judgment of Lord Curzon. The other charge, that the Viceroy bifurcated a nation, is far more difficult to assess. It turns on the question as to whether the people of Bengal in 1905 regarded themselves as a nation or not. When the present writer first went to Bengal some sixteen or seventeen years after partition his impression was that the process of formation of nationality in Bengal was still incomplete. Educated Bengalis, whether Hindus or Muslims, men of Calcutta or of East Bengal, probably had a certain sense of unity which was still lacking amongst the peasantry or amongst illiterate labourers; but at that time a Muhammedan servant in Bengal would speak of his Hindu colleague as ‘Bengali’ and it was difficult to find any community of culture between the Muslims of Barisal and the Hindus of Nadia. Two decades later that unity seemed to have grown in spite of communal dissension, and, illogical as it may seem, many Hindus of West Bengal and Muslims of East Bengal would have been glad to find a means of partitioning India without dividing Bengal in 1947. Whether Bengal had or had not reached the stage where partition was unnatural in 1905 must, therefore, be a matter of individual judgment on which the writer is not prepared to dogmatise.

It is, however, clear that the Calcutta Hindu intelligentsia genuinely felt that their motherland was being mutilated, and those of them who had been influenced by the militant Hinduism of Tilak and his followers were also seriously disturbed at the creation of a Muslim majority province. Sir Surendranath Banerjea, a moderate who firmly opposed the partition, said: ‘We felt that we had been insulted, humiliated and tricked. We felt that the whole of our future was at stake, that it was a deliberate blow aimed at the growing solidarity and self-consciousness of the Bengalee-speaking population . . . it would be fatal to our political progress and to that close union between Hindus and Mohammedans upon which the prospect of Indian advancement so largely depended.’

An intensive campaign of propaganda against partition was at once organised, and political feeling amongst educated Bengalis rose to unprecedented heights. Every religious and patriotic sentiment was called into play, and according to the authors of The Rise and Growth of Congress ‘the ceremony of Rakhi Bandhan was performed, wherein the sister tied a slight woollen thread round her brother’s wrist and asked him to take the vow to undo the partition of Bengal’. From this time onwards women and girls were to play an important part in Bengal politics.

Skilfully exploited by men like Bepin Chandra Pal, the effects of partition on the temper of all India were great indeed. Bengal, in which the militant Brahmanism of Poona had hitherto found only an inadequate response, came rapidly into line with Tilak. The cult of Shivaji could indeed make no headway there, but the fight against partition was carried out under the patronage of the goddess Kali and with the blessing of Hinduism in all its aspects. Barendra Kumar Ghose, brother and student of Arabindo Ghose, together with the brother of that Swami Vivekananda who was the disciple of Ram Krishna Paramahasa, founded the first of the genuinely revolutionary newspapers—The Yugantar. This journal prepared the minds of young Bengalis for terrorism, and it is interesting to note that when a few years later the Bengal terrorist movement was properly organised its most fervid section was also known as the Yugantar. The philosophical foundations of terrorism were established in an article in The Yugantar headed ‘The Age of the Gita again in India’.

‘God (i.e. Krishna in the Gita) has said, “Oh, descendant of Bharata, whenever there be a decline of righteousness and the rise of unrighteousness, then I shall become incarnate again. I shall be born in every Yuga (era) to rescue the good, to destroy the wrongdoer, and to establish righteousness.”

‘In the Duiaprara-Yuga (the era which preceded the present Kali-Yuga, or era of darkness) when righteousness was on the wane and unrighteousness was springing up in the sacred land of India under the hands of Duryyodhana and other miscreants engaged in wickedness, then God, by becoming incarnate again and awakening his favourite disciple Arjuna to duty, re-established the kingdom of righteousness in India. At the present time righteousness is declining and unrighteousness is springing up in India. A handful of alien robbers is ruining the crores of the people of India by robbing the wealth of India. Through the hard grinding of their servitude, the ribs of this countless people are broken to pieces. Endless endeavours are being made in order that this great nation by losing, as an inevitable result of this subjection, its moral, intellectual and physical power, its wealth, its self reliance, and all other qualities, may be turned into the condition of the beasts of burden or be wholly extinguished. Why, oh Indians, are you losing heart, at the sight of many obstacles in your path, to make a stand against this unrighteousness? Fear not, oh Indians. God will not remain inactive at the sight of such unrighteousness in His Kingdom. He will keep His word. Placing firm reliance on the promise of God, invoke His power, and He will descend in your midst to destroy unrighteousness. Do not be afraid. “When the lightning of heaven flashes in their hearts, men perform impossible deeds.’”

A little later the same newspaper—which had the largest circulation ever known in India—burst out into frank exhortations to murder.

‘Will the Bengali worshippers of Shakti shrink from the shedding of blood? The number of Englishmen in this country is not above one lakh and a half, and what is the number of English officials in each district? If you arc firm in your resolution you can in a single day bring English rule to an end. Lay down your life, but first take a life. The worship of the goddess will not be consummated if you sacrifice your lives at the shrine of independence without shedding blood.’

Even for freedom-loving Englishmen it is difficult to understand why this degree of licence was allowed to the Calcutta Press; and a study of the Bengal newspapers of this period is essential for any fair judgment on the general attitude of the British official towards the Indian Press. It can at least be said that no other strong imperial power would have been so tolerant. Throughout this period, if we are to preserve a balanced judgment, we must remember on the one hand the combination of genuine nationalism and resurgent Hinduism, and on the other hand the patience and strength of the British authorities. The view of the philosophic historian several centuries hence may well be that the clash was an inevitable result of British educational and general policy and reflects discredit on neither side.

This cannot excuse either the campaign of terrorism and murder, which was the natural result of inflammatory propaganda, or the complete failure of the British Government to take any effective action against it for the first two years of Lord Minto’s viceroyalty.

The weapons used by those who fought partition were, firstly an economic boycott, and, secondly, a relentless campaign of terrorism and murder. For some time before partition thinking Indians had been much perturbed at the industrial backwardness of India and had started a swadeshi¹⁶ or a ‘Buy Indian’ movement. This naturally appealed to patriotic Bengalis, and it was easy to graft on to it the idea that boycott of British goods would at the same time assist home industries and bring pressure to bear on Britain. Moreover, the time was opportune for such action, as the Chinese boycott of American goods had just become effective and had received considerable publicity in the Indian Press. Moderate leaders like Surendranath Banerjea realised the danger of such a movement, but were powerless to resist the extremist demands, and temporised by treating it as ‘a temporary measure adopted for a particular object . . . to be given up as soon as that object was attained’. Even Mr. Gokhale, the principal opponent of Tilak, and a firm believer that progress could best be achieved in co-operation with the British, for a time justified the boycott as a weapon against partition.

The movement was first taken up by students whose fervour then ‘communicated it to the whole community and inspired it with an impulse the like of which had never been felt before.’ Sir Surendranath Banerjea tells us that ‘it was positively dangerous for a schoolboy or college student to appear in a class or lecture room in clothes made of a foreign stuff. The students would not submit to exercise books being circulated for their class examinations with paper that had been manufactured abroad. I remember a schoolboy appearing in the fourth form of the Ripon Collegiate School with a shirt made of foreign cloth. As soon as the discovery was made, the shirt was torn off his back, and he narrowly escaped lynching. . . . At an examination of the Ripon College students, the College authorities supplied foreign-manufactured paper upon which the answers were to be written. The students in a body refused to touch the blank books that were supplied. So strong was the feeling that it was thought not safe to ignore it. Country-made paper had to be substituted, and the examinations then proceeded in the usual way. . . . The Swadeshi movement invaded our homes and captured the hearts of our womenfolk, who were even more enthusiastic than the men. A grand-daughter of mine, then only five years old, returned a pair of shoes that had been sent to her by a relative because they were of foreign make. . . . An eminent doctor told me that in the height of the Swadeshi movement a girl-patient of his, not more than six years old, cried out in her delirium that she would not take any foreign medicine’.

Adults soon followed the example of the students.

‘Swadeshism during the days of its potency coloured the entire texture of our social and domestic life. Marriage presents that included foreign goods, the like of which could be manufactured at home, were returned. Priests would often decline to officiate at ceremonies where foreign articles were offered as oblations to the gods. Guests would refuse to participate in festivities where foreign salt or foreign sugar was used. So great was the pressure of public opinion that no Bengalee would think of purchasing a foreign-made dhoti or saree, and if he wanted to do so for its cheapness, it had to be done during the hours of darkness, when no eyes would watch him, or, if watched, he would elude observation under the friendly covering of night.’

Swadeshi meetings were organised throughout the province, where the speakers were often supported by Bengali songs specially written for the purpose. Music, indeed, played a great part in the anti-partition propaganda, and it was at this time that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s song ‘Bandi Mataram’¹⁷ became virtually the Bengali national anthem. It is an inspiring song full of love for the motherland, but it loses much in translation.

‘My Motherland I sing; Thou art my head,
Thou art my heart.
My life and soul art thou, my soul, my worship and my heart,
Before thy feet I bow.’

The song is taken from a novel dealing with the Sanyasi raids of 1772 in which the British had suffered local reverses. It was, therefore, appropriate to an anti-British campaign and was interpreted by the authorities as an invocation of the goddess Mother Kali against the British. It is not necessary to discuss the literary soundness or otherwise of this view. In practice, Bande Mataram became the war cry of those who sought to drive out the British, and the present writer recollects vividly how, many years after the partition, Bengali terrorists regularly went to the gallows with this cry on their lips and in their hearts. A movement of this kind, however conceived in the minds of some of its founders, was bound to lead to violence—and there were amongst the organisers not a few who desired that outcome. From 1907 onwards terrorist crime was rife in Bengal for nearly thirty years. It is not necessary for our purpose to follow in detail this tragic story. It is more important to consider, firstly, the moral support given to terrorism by many middle-class people who themselves had no direct hands in the murders, and, secondly, the deleterious effect of this organised lawlessness on the youth of Bengal.

When Khudiram Bose was hanged for the murder of two British ladies (in the attempt to murder a British District Magistrate) a large section of the youthful intelligentsia treated him as a martyr, and according to Valentine Chirol ‘the young Bengalee bloods took to wearing dhotis with Khudiram Bose’s name woven into the border of the garment’. A little later, in the famous Manicktollah bomb case, nineteen youths were found guilty of an elaborate conspiracy to collect arms, manufacture bombs, and bring about revolution. An approver and a police officer were shot dead, and the Session Judge who tried the case stated: ‘There can be no doubt that the majority of the witnesses . . . are in sympathy with the accused.’ Rarely during the course of the terrorist movement, either in this first phase or in its later period in the decade before the second war, was there any unequivocal condemnation by the Press or by Hindu leaders of political murders. Terrorism must indeed be regarded as not just the work of a few misguided youths but rather as the expression of the great feeling of violent hostility to the British Government on the part of a large section of educated Bengali Hindus, particularly in Calcutta.

Although every right-minded man must condemn in the strongest terms the cult of political murder, it is easy for any lover of freedom to understand the feeling that lay behind it. Unfortunately, the outrages committed and encouraged under this influence permanently demoralised the middle-class Hindus of Bengal and have borne unhappy fruit in the last few years. Other classes in Bengal were not greatly interested in the fight against partition, and in general the Muslims naturally held aloof. It thus widened the gulf between Hindus and Muslims in that province.

The anti-partition agitation was soon submerged in the wider aim of displacing the British, and in this form may be linked up with the nationalist movement in Bombay, the Deccan, and the Punjab. It profoundly modified the attitude of the Congress Party, and we must now turn to the sessions of that body from 1905 onwards.

Chapter XXXI

Indian National Congress: The Second Phase

The first twenty sessions of Congress were characterised, in the main, by moderation and by confidence in the intentions of Britain. In 1905 a new tone was heard. Members spoke of the rise of Japan, whose victory over European Russia had profoundly impressed the Indian mind, and it was stated that ‘national indignation had been filled to overflowing by the partition designed to break down the political power and influence of the educated opinion of Bengal’. Nevertheless, the Nationalists who opposed a resolution of welcome to the Prince and Princess of Wales were defeated. At the following session in December 1906 the President, Dadabhai Naoroji, made the first official demand for ‘Swaraj’ or self-government, ‘like that of the United Kingdom or the Colonies’, while the official resolutions of the Congress supported the swadeshi movement and authorised the use of boycott as a political weapon. At that session, in spite of the influence of Dadabhai, ‘the triumph of Tilak’s party was complete’.

In 1907 the moderates had the upper hand and did not propose to reaffirm the resolution regarding swadeshi and the boycott. The extremists, under the personal guidance of Tilak, were determined that if those resolutions were not moved there should be no Congress session. They refused to hear their President, the veteran but moderate nationalist, Dr. Rash Behari Ghose; they occupied the platform by force, and compelled the President to close the session. This was not only the introduction of a new technique of obstruction, but it also marked the parting of the ways between the moderates and the extremists—a division which was to last for many years. At that time the leaders of the moderates were Gokhale and Sir Surendrenath Banerjea, while the extremists were led by Tilak and Arabindo Ghose.

In 1908 the position of the moderates was greatly strengthened by the Morley-Minto reforms, which were foreshadowed in the proclamation of the King on the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s original proclamation. The reforms were announced on 17th September 1908 and passed into law in the following year. They will be discussed in a later chapter of this book and here we need only note that they established non-official majorities in the Provincial Councils; that some of the non-officials were, for the first time, to be elected, and that the powers of the Councils were considerably expanded. More spectacular, if not more important, was the inclusion of Indian members in the Executive Council of the central Provincial Governments. In the Imperial Council the official majority was to be maintained. This was a considerable step forward, and, in spite of disappointment that there were not to be elected majorities in the Councils, it was recognised as such by all moderate influences. Gokhale had no hesitation after this in advocating loyalty to the British Crown and co-operation with the Government in the hope of further progress. He contended, firstly, ‘that considering the difficulties of the position, Britain had done very well in India’, and, secondly, ‘that there was no alternative to British rule and could be none for a long time. . . . They could proceed in two directions; first towards the obliteration of distinctions on the grounds of race between individual Indians and individual Englishmen; secondly by way of advance towards the form of Government enjoyed in other parts of the Empire. The latter was an ideal for which the Indian people had to qualify themselves, for the whole question turned on capacity. They must realise that their main difficulties lay with themselves’. This was indeed the crux of Gokhale’s speeches—that the attainment of a democratic form of government must depend on the average strength of character and capacity of the Indian people, and that they had a long way to go.

The extremists naturally made great play with the separate communal electorates which were set up under the Morley-Minto reform, and which they alleged were introduced by the British in order to ‘divide and rule’. In Bengal terrorism continued and the supporting propaganda is illustrated by the following pamphlet issued from a secret press a short time after Gokhale’s statesmanlike speech at Poona.

‘Rise up, O rise up O sons of India. Arm yourselves with bombs, despatch the white Asuras to Yama’s abode. Invoke the mother Kali; bear your arms with valour. The mother asks for sacrificial offerings. What does the Mother want? A coconut? No! A fowl or a sheep or a buffalo? No! She wants many white Asuras. The mother is thirsting after the blood of the Feringhees who have bled her profusely. Satisfy her. Killing the Feringhee we say is no murder. Brother chant this verse while slaying the Feringhee white goat, for killing him is no murder. With the close of a long era the Feringhee empire draws to an end, for behold! Kali rises in the east!’

It is scarcely surprising that in 1910 the Government found it necessary to pass the Press Act, imposing forfeiture of security for inflammatory writing—a measure which, on a balanced view, must be regarded as mild in comparison with the extreme violence of important sections of the Press in the preceding years. Nevertheless, it provided fresh grist to the extremist mill. The moderates now dominated the Congress, and even in its criticism of communal electorates and certain other features of the Morley-Minto reforms that body was not prepared to go beyond placing on record strong disapproval, ‘while gratefully appreciating the earnest and arduous effort of Lord Morley and Lord Minto in extending to the people of this country a fairly liberal measure of constitutional reform’.

In 1910 Lord Hardinge became Viceroy, and his sympathetic attitude led the moderate leaders to hope for a rapprochement between them and the Government. In the following year Their Majesties’ visit to India was made the occasion of an announcement that the capital would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi, and that partition would be modified in such a way as to restore undivided Bengal. The timing of this announcement was important. The first furious anti-partition agitation was spent; the Press Act and other measures had enabled the Government to get the general situation well in hand, and probably most Indian politicians had ceased to hope for annulment of partition. The decision was not, therefore, a surrender to force, and the moderates could reasonably claim that their constitutional agitation had brought conviction to the minds of the British Government. This immeasurably strengthened the position of the moderates. The President of the 1911 session of Congress declared that ‘the destinies of India and England are now linked together, and that in order to succeed in their political struggles it is indispensable that the sympathies of the English people should be enlisted on our side’. The President, nevertheless, declared that most of India’s misfortunes were due to ‘the unsympathetic and illiberal spirit of bureaucracy towards the newborn hopes and ideals of the Indian peoples’. It was, indeed, still the moderates’ belief that the British at home were very different from the British in India, and that constitutional agitation would sooner or later result in removal of just grievances by the British Parliament. They were, moreover, buoyed up by a passage in the Government of India’s despatch regarding the proposals for annulment of partition, which seemed to foreshadow the gradual expansion of the powers of Provincial Governments until, except for matters of imperial concern, the provinces were to be virtually autonomous. This interpretation was repudiated by the Secretary of State, but the Congress nevertheless clung to it.

When war broke out in 1914 India was in a more satisfactory condition, except for the continuance of terrorism in Bengal, than for some years. Tilak, who had been released in 1914, seemed to have abandoned his militant attitude for the time being. The new Legislative Councils were working well, and the extremists had lost much of their influence. Lord Hardinge had won general affection, and at the same time the Congress made serious attempts to come to an understanding with the Muslims, and thus undo the harm which had been done during the partition agitation. The war evoked a spontaneous outburst of loyalty from all classes of Indians. Mr. Gandhi offered himself for active service, and declared that Indians in the U.K. ‘should place themselves unconditionally at the disposal of the authorities’, while at the 1914 session of Congress the President spoke of British and Indians mingling their blood in the cause of ‘honour, liberty and justice’. The position of the Muslims was difficult after the entry of Turkey into the war, but they, too, offered loyal support and controversial issues were for a time put aside. As the months passed the feeling grew that India’s great contribution to the war effort more than ever entitled her to a liberal measure of self-government. Throughout 1915 the moderates continued to predominate; and in spite of their dislike of the Defence Act—necessitated by the continuance of revolutionary activities—they took pride in India’s part in the war, and were resolved not to embarrass the Government.

In 1916 new factors emerged, and the atmosphere deteriorated. Tilak had tired of inactivity and resumed his former belligerence. Mrs. Besant set herself the task of awakening national pride and stirring up new demands. ‘I am an Indian tomtom,’ she said, ‘waking up all the sleepers so that they may wake and work for their Motherland.’ For this purpose she founded the Home Rule League, with fifty branches in various parts of India.

Other factors, more potent than any of these personal influences, were also at work. The ferment of ideas created by the war had opened the minds of the Indian people to new aspirations. The freedom for which the Allies were fighting must mean freedom for India, too—surely if Indians were fit to die for a great cause they were fit to govern themselves? Self-determination was in the air and India was no longer isolated from world movements.

Certain sections of the Muslims were growing more uneasy. Their confidence in the British Government had been rudely shaken before the war by the annulment of the partition of Bengal, and they were now profoundly disturbed by the position of Turkey as the result of the revolt of the Sharif of Mecca against the Sultan of Turkey. Some of the Muslims even believed this revolution to have been inspired by the British. Hindus and Muslims were thus both in a difficult mood, which was naturally aggravated by the Irish rebellion of 1916. The eyes of educated Indians had long been on Ireland, and this latest development stirred them considerably. The two communities for a time moved closer together, and in November 1916 representative Hindus and Muslims met in Calcutta and agreed to make a united demand for self-government, though they still disagreed about important matters of principle.

The 1916 session of the Congress at Lucknow was of great importance. The extremists secured control, and in the words of the President, Mr. Ambica Charan Majumdar, ‘if the United Congress was buried at Surat it is reborn today at Lucknow’. The Muslim leaders met at the same time in Lucknow, and a joint Hindu-Muslim reform scheme was sent to the Viceroy. Its most important provision was that Muslims should be represented in the Council by separate electorates, and on this basis they demanded an immediate declaration of Britain’s intention to confer self-government on India at an early date. As an earnest of that intention they also asked for an immediate reconstitution of the Imperial Legislative Council with a non-official majority, as well as the inclusion of non-officials as members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. At the Muslim League meeting Mr. Jinnah made his first really important speech, and in view of the change of views forced on him by circumstances later it merits quotation. ‘There is first the great fact of the British rule in India with its Western character and standards of administration, which, while retaining absolute power of initiative, direction, and decision, has maintained for many decades unbroken peace and order in the land, administered even-handed justice, brought the Indian mind, through a widespread system of Western education, into contact with the thoughts and ideals of the West, and thus led to the birth of a great and living movement for the intellectual and moral regeneration of the people. . . . Secondly, there is the fact of the existence of a powerful, unifying process—the most vital and interesting result of Western education in the country—which is creating, out of the diverse mass of race and creed, a new India fast growing to unity of thought, purpose, and outlook, responsive to new appeals of territorial patriotism and nationality, stirring with new energy and aspiration, and becoming daily more purposeful and eager to recover its birthright to direct its own affairs and govern itself.’ For the first time Hindu and Muslim aims were identical.

Although general circumstances compelled the authorities to take action against Mrs. Besant and others, the British Government set itself to remove grievances wherever possible. The cotton duty was raised so that Indian cloth was given substantial protection; an Industrial Commission was appointed to examine methods of development of Indian industry; and the Defence Bill opened recruitment to the Indian Army to classes hitherto regarded as non-martial. Still more important, on 2nd August 1917 the Secretary of State, E. S. Montagu, made the famous pronouncement which was to be the basis of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and to govern British policy henceforth. He declared that ‘the policy of His Majesty’s Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. It went on to declare that progress in this policy would be by stages, that the British Government must be the judge as to ‘the time and measure of each advance’, and that the Secretary of State would visit India in order that ‘substantial steps in this direction should be taken as soon as possible’. The pronouncement was well received, and in its session of December 1917, although the extremists were dominant, the Congress expressed its most grateful satisfaction. The extremists were not content to leave matters there, and carried on propaganda unceasingly, in spite of Mr. Gandhi’s continued support of the war effort; and when the Montagu-Chelmsford report was published in July 1918 they attacked it bitterly. It nevertheless formed the basis of the 1919 Government of India Act which came into force in 1921.

The reforms will be discussed in a later chapter of the book. It is sufficient to say here that they provided for elected majorities in the Indian Legislature and that they established what was known as ‘dyarchy’. Under this provision each Provincial Government was to consist of two elements. Indian ministers were to be in charge of ‘transferred’ subjects and British governors or officials in charge of ‘reserved’ subjects. Mrs. Besant described the reform as ‘leading to a line beyond which its authors cannot go—a perpetual slavery which can only be broken by revolution’. Other extremists rapidly took their cue from her and their criticisms of the reforms were in many cases intemperate. The attitude of the moderates towards the reforms was diametrically opposite to that of the extremists, and the rift between the two sections seemed complete. The moderates, knowing themselves to be in a minority, declined to attend the special session of Congress called to discuss the Montagu-Chelmsford Report at Bombay in August 1918 and held a separate conference of their own.

Unfortunately the announcement of the scheme of reforms almost coincided with the report of the Rowlatt Committee. Revolutionary crime had for long been rife in Bengal and there and elsewhere in India had been a source of constant anxiety during the war. A committee was therefore appointed under Mr. Justice Rowlatt to investigate the extent of revolutionary conspiracies and to recommend legislation to deal with them. The report left no doubt as to the widespread nature of the danger, and also made it clear that the Defence of India Act had been effective in dealing with revolutionary attempts. The committee apprehended a recrudescence of terrorist crime when that Act lapsed at the end of the war, and considered that the Government should be armed with powers which might have to be used to deal with the situation then. The findings of the Rowlatt Committee were fully corroborated by a committee of two High Court Judges, including one Indian, Sir Narain Chandravarkar, set up to examine the cases of persons detained without trial. They found that the different revolutionary groups were connected and that they must be regarded as part of one continuous movement of revolution. The main measures suggested by the Rowlatt Committee were the trial of cases of revolutionary crime by three judges without juries (who might have been subject to intimidation), and the conferring upon Provincial Governments of power to intern persons concerned in the movement. Such measures must always be distasteful to an Englishman, but they cannot be considered extreme in the light of the extent of the conspiracies, or of the fact that ordinary people were so terrified by the revolutionaries that they dared not give evidence against them. The moderates seemed to face both ways. They admitted and deplored the existence of the revolutionary movement, but they would not take the responsibility of arming the executive with power to deal with it. They had, in the meantime, virtually seceded from the Congress and established Liberal Leagues to express their views. The extremists ran riot and circulated the most fantastic stories as to the intentions and effects of the proposed legislation. The President of the 1918 Congress, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, evoked the aid of the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S.A. Senate, while others set themselves to stir up a violent agitation thus graphically described in the judgment of the court which tried the Lahore riot cases a little later. ‘There may perhaps,’ the judgment said, ‘have been some few persons who believed that the Rowlatt Bills, if enacted, were liable to abuse, and doubtless a good many more were roused to opposition by the speeches in the Imperial Legislative Council and the campaign in the Press, but the bulk of the city population do not read newspapers, and would have remained in complete ignorance, not merely of the objections to the Bills, but even of their existence, unless other steps had been taken to educate them. . . . But even of the educated few, hardly any one appears to have read or considered the Bills for himself, and it was not the business of any one to combat all or any of the lies and misrepresentations which were in circulation. . . . It was commonly believed that all and sundry, though innocent of all crime, would be arrested at the will of the police and condemned without trial; that all assemblies of three or more people would be prohibited; and that in some mysterious way even the women and children would be made to suffer.’

The extremists now cast off all restraint. They had already at the special Congress session rejected the Montagu-Chelmsford reform proposals as ‘disappointing and unsatisfactory’, and at the ordinary session of December 1918 they had reaffirmed and emphasised their objections to them. Their proceedings inside the Congress Session were comparatively restrained, but in the country at large they carried on a campaign so violent and intemperate that it was bound to lead to serious disorders. Even Mrs. Besant at this stage felt bound to warn them that India could not do without England in the sphere of defence, and from this time onwards she began to draw away from the Congress. It has happened with astonishing frequency, in modern Indian politics, that men and women of great ability and insight have spent months and years trying to rouse the feelings of the masses and have then appeared to be surprised at the inevitable result.

It is unfortunate that at this stage Mr. Gandhi, whose influence had by now grown great, lent his support to the extremists and threatened non-violent civil disobedience if the Rowlatt Legislation was passed. This threat met with the disapproval of the moderate Congress leaders. The main Rowlatt Bill became law in 1919, and Mr. Gandhi then called for a hartal¹⁸ throughout India on 6th April 1919. As an earlier hartal at Delhi on 8th March had led to serious disorder and the police had been compelled to open fire, Mr. Gandhi was arrested on his way to Delhi and Amritsar and sent back to Bombay. When this became known, violent disorders broke out at Ahmadabad and elsewhere. An Indian official was deliberately burned alive while Europeans were assaulted and property destroyed. Mr. Gandhi had stirred up forces which neither he nor anybody else could control. In a mood of penitence he called off the civil-disobedience movement and, in his own words, ‘I have declared a penitential fast of three days for myself. I made up my mind to suspend satyagraha¹⁹ so long as people had not learned the lesson of peace. I was firmly of opinion that those who wanted to lead the people to Satyagraha ought to be able to keep the people within the limited non-violence expected of them. I have called on the people to launch civil disobedience before they have qualified themselves for it.’

Mr. Gandhi’s penitence could not calm down the Punjab, which was already aflame with excitement. Revolutionaries had been active there since 1907 and had for some years enjoyed the financial and moral support of the ghadr party consisting of certain Indians in the United States of America. A large number of Sikhs who had been infected with the doctrines of the ghadr returned to the Punjab during the early part of the war, and some of them joined in a conspiracy for a great rising in Lahore and Amritsar in 1915. Fortunately the overwhelming majority of the people of the Punjab were wholeheartedly behind the war effort and their loyalty, together with the vigilance of the authorities, frustrated the plan. Troublous elements were kept under control by means of the Defence of India Act, but in 1919 economic difficulties resulting from high prices, combined with Muslim perturbation over Turkey, provided the revolutionaries with an admirable opportunity.

Intensive and malicious propaganda regarding the Rowlatt Act was carried on and the hartal of 6th April 1919 dangerously inflamed feelings. Riots broke out in Lahore, but the most serious trouble was in Amritsar. On 10th April 1919 two leading extremists were deported, and at the same time news was received that Mr. Gandhi had been prevented by the authorities from visiting the Punjab. The excitement was intense. A hartal was organised; angry crowds demonstrated; banks were looted and their British agents murdered; post and telegraph offices were burned and railways lines destroyed. According to the account of the Congress historian Dr. Satypal, the crowds of 10th April were originally quite peaceful and only wanted to go to the Deputy Commissioner to get the deportation orders against the two leaders cancelled. They only became angry, according to this account, because they were stopped at the railway bridge, after which the police opened fire. In the writer’s judgment this is not the correct interpretation of what happened, but it is difficult to dogmatise regarding the feelings and intentions of a crowd, and it seems right, therefore to state the Congress view.

‘The people collected in thousands and decided to go to the Deputy Commissioner to get the deportation orders cancelled. They wanted to see the Deputy Commissioner to secure their release. What a childlike faith in the fairness and justice of the British, particularly of the type and school of Sir Michael whose one aim and objective in life was to crush the souls of the Indians.

‘The crowd was peaceful and non-violent, harmless and we should say fully determined to behave as the worthy followers of Gandhiji and his assistants. But they were stopped from crossing the Railway Bridge, and on their insisting to proceed, were fired upon.

‘This changed the mood of the people. The people, after seeing some of them killed or wounded, could not keep themselves under full control.

If the Deputy Commissioner would have given the people a sympathetic hearing, the crisis might have been averted.’

The writer regards this interpretation as unreal, but, whichever view is right, the important fact is that the situation was completely out of hand for a time, not only in Amritsar, but also in neighbouring towns and villages. A few days later, on 17th April 1919, a crowd of five thousand people assembled at the Jallianawala Bagh in defiance of an order prohibiting meetings. General Dyer, with an armed force of twenty-five Gurkhas and twenty-five Sikhs, opened fire without effective warning and, on his own admission, continued firing until the crowds had been fully dispersed. General Dyer’s action—together with his notorious ‘crawling order’, which will find nobody to defend it today—has been the subject of endless and bitter controversy which we need not pursue here. The only fact germane to our subject is that though his action, together with the stern measures taken elsewhere, restored order to the Punjab and perhaps prevented a large-scale revolution, it did more than any other single act or event to strengthen the position of the extremists in the rest of India. It inflamed a hatred in Indian hearts which was not extinguished for many years. Indian politicians have written and spoken bitterly about the severity of the martial law imposed in the Punjab and the floggings and other drastic punishments awarded thereunder, but it is doubtful whether these happenings would have burned themselves so deeply into their minds but for the events of the Jallianawala Bagh. It is scarcely too much to say that the Jallianawala Bagh prejudiced whatever chances there might have been that the Congress as a whole would welcome the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms.

This effect was not at once apparent, and at the 1919 Congress in Amritsar there was a keen division of opinion. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mr. Gandhi wanted to offer co-operation, but C. R. Das stood for complete rejection of the reforms. The result was a triumph for Mr. Gandhi, whose final comment on the Punjab and other troubles was that ‘the Government went mad at the time; we went mad also at the time’. Mr. Gandhi, in fact, now stood for co-operation, though his mood was soon to change again.

At this time the Khilafat agitation, which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, became serious. The Khilafat delegation, which had been sent to England to influence opinion in favour of leniency towards Turkey, returned home angry at the terms of the peace treaty with Turkey. They therefore joined Congress in the general condemnation of the Jallianawala Bagh shootings as well as in the virtual rejection of the reforms. Mr. Gandhi now departed completely from his Amritsar attitude, became almost the sponsor of the Muslim case and set his mind towards non-co-operation. The non-co-operation movement was formally inaugurated on 1st August 1920 by Mr. Gandhi, and the brothers Mahommad Ali and Shaukat Ali, who were the principal leaders of the Khilafat movement, toured the country.

A special session of Congress was called in Calcutta in September 1920. Much of its time was devoted to a discussion of Punjab affairs, but the most important item of business was Mr. Gandhi’s non-co-operation resolution. It referred to the Khilafat question, it dealt with the troubles in the Punjab, and it asserted that the only way ‘to prevent a repetition of similar wrongs in future is the establishment of Swarajya’. Then came the operative part of the resolution. ‘There is no course left open for the people of India but to approve of and adopt the policy of progressive non-violent Non-co-operation inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi, until the said wrongs are righted and Swarajya is established.’ It went on to declare that the beginning should be made by the educated classes; it advised all concerned to surrender titles and honorary offices; to resign from seats in nominated local bodies; to boycott British courts; to refuse to attend government levees, durbars or other functions; to withdraw children from schools or colleges aided or controlled by the Government and to withdraw candidates for election to the reformed councils. It went on to say: ‘And inasmuch as Non-co-operation has been conceived as a measure of discipline and self-sacrifice without which no nation can make real progress, and inasmuch as an opportunity should be given in the very first stage of Non-co-operation to every man, woman and child for such discipline and self-sacrifice, this Congress advises adoption of Swadeshi in piece-goods on a vast scale, and inasmuch as the existing mills of India with indigenous capital and control do not manufacture sufficient yarn and sufficient cloth for the requirements of the Nation, and are not likely to do so for a long time to come, this Congress advises immediate stimulation of further manufacture on a large scale by means of reviving hand-spinning in every house and hand-weaving on the part of the millions of weavers who have abandoned their ancient and honourable calling for want of encouragement.’

A new phase in Congress activities had thus begun and the history of India for some years to come was to be largely the story of non-co-operation and boycott. The extremists had triumphed, thanks partly to their skilful exploitation of the Rowlatt Act, but still more to the genuine indignation of educated Indians at the happenings in the Jallianawala Bagh; while Muslims joined because of the Khilafat movement. Mr. Gandhi, for reasons which are difficult to understand, was swept along with the extremists and recanted much of what he had said a few months earlier.

Chapter XXXII

The Rise of the Muslim League

Much of the history of twentieth-century India is concerned with the struggle between the Hindus and the Muslims as to what should be the form of the constitution and the distribution of power when India attained self-government. We have already studied the growth of the mainly Hindu Congress Party down to the commencement of the first non-co-operation movement in 1920, and it now remains to consider the rise of the Muslim League.

The basis of the Muslim League was the conviction of many Muslims that their interests were fundamentally different from those of the Hindus and that they would never receive fair treatment under any system of majority rule, which would necessarily be Hindu rule. At a later stage they developed the famous ‘two-nation theory’, but in the early days they were content to emphasise that their culture, their economic position and their needs differed radically from those of the Hindus. This conviction was superimposed on memories of the spacious days when Muslims ruled large parts of India—often, it is true, employing Hindus in offices of trust, but never letting go the reins of authority.

The replacement of the Mughal by the British Empire was far more serious in its consequences for the Muslims than for the Hindus. Muslim nobles had held most of the offices of state, and had ruled vast territories as viceroys of the emperor; Muslim learned men had expounded the law; and Muslims had acquired the largest and most profitable zemindaris. With the expansion of British power this privileged position disappeared. The courtiers and viceroys gave way to English servants of the Company. In areas such as Bengal Muslim landowners were ousted, and their places taken by enterprising Hindu revenue farmers; while in the field of law the substitution of English for Muslim law practically disqualified Muslim lawyers from office. According to H. C. Bowen writing in the second half of the nineteenth century: ‘From having monopolised the posts of pleaders of the High Court even as late as 1851 . . . out of 240 natives admitted between 1852 and 1869 there was only one Mussalman.’ The Hindus, on the other hand, at any rate in Northern India, were comparatively little affected by this change or perhaps even gained by it. High-class Hindus of good education had served the Mughals faithfully in the various government departments, and they continued similarly to serve the British. Wealthy Hindus had perforce to conceal their wealth in Mughal times and for fear of confiscation could not come out into the open and enjoy the benefits of their affluence. Flexibility of mind has always been a characteristic of the Brahman, and he adapted himself with intelligence and realism to the new régime. Moreover, Hindus took readily to English education, and, as we have seen earlier, were for a time fascinated by Western ideas. The infinite absorptive capacity of Hinduism was again demonstrated. The Muslims, on the other hand, were shocked by the secularisation of education, and when the abolition of Persian as the official language deprived many of them of a natural advantage they refused to take to English learning in its place. An official pamphlet on Pakistan tells us that in 1872 ‘out of three hundred students on the roll of the Hoogly College [which was maintained by the East India Company out of the income of a Moslem educational trust] only three were Moslems’.

The Muslims thus tended to become the hewers of wood and drawers of water, while Hindus qualified for and obtained positions of greater authority. In India a position of this kind tends to perpetuate itself. The writer knows from his own experience that a Hindu Office Superintendent will nearly always try to elevate the Hindus and depress the Muslims subordinate to him, while the opposite is true when there is a Muslim Superintendent. Whatever community is down thus tends to remain so.

Although the position of inferiority which the Muslims acquired was partly their own fault, they naturally resented it, and even before the Mutiny they were in a sullen mood. British officials on the whole tended to regard the Muslims as having been primarily responsible for the Mutiny, and as a result of that episode there was a further depression of the Muslim position.

In the meantime the age-long factor of Hindu-Muslim antagonism had been at work. It is not surprising that such feelings should from time to time flare up between two communities which are geographically intermingled, but which can neither intermarry nor dine together, and which have very divergent philosophies and standards of life. In the nineteenth century both these communities went through a revivalist phase and this necessarily emphasised the natural antagonism. On the Muslim side the revival was linked with the jehad against the Sikhs which was declared by the Puritan reformer Maulana Sayyad Ahmad Shaheed of Bareli in 1826. In its earlier phases the revival was active only in the Punjab, but a generation or so later it was carried on energetically in East Bengal. Great enthusiasm was stirred, even amongst ordinary villagers, and side by side with fanaticism went a genuine revival of Islamic culture.

This need not necessarily have clashed with those semi-occidental movements typified by the Brahmo Samaj, but the position was very different when the militant and intolerant Arya Samaj became an important factor in Hindu life and thought. The doctrine of ‘Arya for the Aryans’ was stated in precise terms many years later by Golwalkor: ‘The Muslim invaders . . . ruled over India only for a matter of 800 years and this period does not entitle Muslims to become nationals of Hindustan.’ This thought was inherent in the teaching of the Arya Samaj and other militant Hindu bodies in the second half of the nineteenth century. Conflict was inevitable, and the clash of ideas led to serious rioting seven times in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century.

Shortly before the foundation of the Indian National Congress the Muslims found a great leader in the person of Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He found his co-religionists backward and despondent; he realised that English liberal ideas would be likely to shape India, and he warned Muslims that this might well mean Hindu dominion. There were three Hindus for every Muslim, and, moreover, the Hindus were advanced in Western education. In 1883 he gave public utterance to his fears: ‘The system of representation by election means the representation of the views and interests of the majority of the population. . . . In a country like India where class distinctions still flourish and where there is no fusion of the various races, where religious differences are still violent, where education in the modern sense has not made an equal or proportionate progress amongst all sections of the population. I am convinced that the introduction of the principle of election pure and simple, for the representation of various interests on local boards and district councils, would be attended with evils of greater significance than purely economic considerations. . . . The larger community would totally over-ride the interests of the smaller community.’

This did not mean that he was opposed to the gradual attainment of self-government for India, but that he thought it should not be on the English parliamentary model. When the Congress was founded, he advised Muslims to keep away from it and organised a body known as the Mushtarka-Jamait-e-Muhibban-e-Hind, or Joint Committee of the Friends of India; and according to the author of The Moslem League Yesterday and Today, he wrote to a British friend that ‘the aim of this party is to oppose the political ideals and activities of the Congress’. At the same time he worked strenuously to persuade Muslims to take to Western education; he founded the Muslim educational conference and established the University of Aligarh. The genuineness of the Muslim fears was recognised at the time of passing the Local Self-Government Act of 1883–4, and that Act provided safeguards for Muslims and other minority interests by means of nominated seats.

Muslims on the whole accepted Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s advice and remained aloof from the Congress. It is true that the Muslim proportion of Congress delegates grew from 3 per cent in 1885 to 22 per cent in 1890, but the India Councils Act of 1892, which increased the non-official element in the Council, frightened the Muslims, and by 1905 their representation in the Congress had fallen to 17 out of 756.

The Hindu agitation against the partition of Bengal, which the Muslims considered to have been very favourable to their interests, together with the blatant Hindu militancy of Tilak, convinced the Muslims that they needed a more effective political organisation, and on 30th December 1906 the All-India Muslim League was founded. Its objectives were defined as being (a) to promote, amongst the Mussalmans of India, feelings of loyalty to the British Government and to remove any misconception that may arise as to the intentions of government with regard to Indian measures; (b) to protect and advance the political rights of the Mussalmans of India and respectfully represent their needs and aspirations to the Government; and (c) to prevent the rise among the Mussalmans of India of any feeling of hostility towards other communities without prejudice to the other aforementioned objects of the League. Whatever may have been the other effects of the foundation of the Muslim League, it set the seal upon the Muslim belief that their interests must be regarded as completely separate from those of the Hindus, and that no fusion of the two communities was possible.

The Indian Councils Act of 1892 had not provided for elected members of the Legislative Councils, but it had established a procedure by which certain bodies would recommend names of members whom the Government would appoint if it thought fit. This was dangerously near the principle of election, and when the Morley-Minto Reforms were under consideration Muslims therefore made a vigorous demand for separate Muslim representation on the Council and for ‘weightage’ i.e. for representation commensurate not merely with their numerical strength, but also with their political importance and the value of the contribution they would make to the defence of the Empire. They were not prepared to agree to joint constituencies with reserved Muslim seats, for they felt that the wealth and education of the Hindus would enable them to secure the return of Muslims who did not truly represent their community.

Indian politicians have bitterly reproached Britain for introducing the principle of communal electorates in the Morley-Minto reforms. In reality there was no practical alternative. If semi-parliamentary bodies such as the Morley-Minto Councils were to mean anything at all, it was essential that all communities should be genuinely represented in them. The gulf between the Hindus and the Muslims at that time was wide, and nobody with experience of modern India will doubt that under any system of joint electorates the Hindus would have secured the return of non-representative Muslims. The philosopher might deplore the fact that Hindus and Muslims thought of themselves as separate peoples, but the statesman had to accept it. The fears of the Muslims were real and deep-seated. When the Congress leaders some years later formed a temporary alliance with the Muslims they, too, had to recognise those fears; perhaps the greatest justification of the British establishment of communal electorates lies in the fact that they were recognised in 1916 by the Lucknow Pact.

At the time of the Morley-Minto reforms the policy of the Muslim League was to ask for an increasing measure of self-government, provided adequate safeguards for Muslim interests were devised. The emphasis was on the proviso rather than on the main demand, for the Muslims then preferred British rule to Hindu dominance. In the next few years two factors changed their attitude. In the first place, the annulment of the partition, after they had been assured that it was a settled fact, destroyed their faith in the British Government. Muslim leaders, such as the Nawab of Dacca—who had spared no effort to counter the anti-Government agitation in East Bengal—were taken completely by surprise, and stated frankly that they would never again trust the British Government. Shortly after this arose the complications of the Balkan War, when the hostility of Britain to Turkey was resented by Indian Muslims. Two important figures in Muslim politics, Mahommed Ali and Abul Kalam Azad, came to the front at this time, and both of them bitterly attacked the British Government in their journals as well as in their speeches. Muslims began to doubt if Britain would, in fact, protect them against a Hindu majority, and they therefore set themselves to do a deal with the Congress. The result was the Lucknow Pact of 1916, according to which the Muslim League joined in the demand for self-government at an early date, while the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslim members of the Council and agreed to the principle of ‘weightage’ for minorities.

This union was unnatural in the sense that many Hindus disapproved of the acceptance of the communal electorate, and it would perhaps not have endured as long as it did but for factors arising out of the First World War. The great fear in the minds of Muslims during that war was that the Turkish Khilafat would be destroyed. Mahommed Ali declared that ‘the Khilafat was the most essential institution of the Moslem community throughout the world’. The vast majority of the Muslims in the world had recognised the Sultan of Turkey to be the Commander of the Faithful and a successor and Khalifa of their Prophet. It was an essential part of that doctrine that the Khalifa, the Commander of the Faithful, should have ‘adequate territories, adequate military and naval resources, adequate financial resources’. At the end of the war the League sent a deputation to England to urge this view, but it returned empty-handed. Immediately after the publication of the Turkish Peace Treaty in 1920 the Khilafat movement, which was in fact a rebellion against Britain in support of Turkey, was accordingly launched. Mr. Gandhi, with consummate political skill, took the movement under his wing, and so combined the Khilafat movement with the Congress non-co-operation campaign. It seems incredible that the warlike Muslim leaders could have worked in harness either with the apostle of peace or with the militant Hindu leaders, but Mahommed Ali frankly regarded it as a marriage of convenience. For the time being all were prepared to join in attacking the common enemy, England. The story of the attack, its failure and the breakdown of the Congress-League alliance, belongs to a later chapter.

Chapter XXXIII

Steps Towards Self-Government

Few British traits have aroused more foreign criticism than the traditional belief in the inevitability of gradualness. To a logical people like the French it has always appeared to result from lack of clear thinking, while educated Hindus have generally regarded it as hypocrisy. Nowhere is it seen more clearly in action than in India in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. In the ninety years between the Mutiny and the transfer of power seven definite steps were taken towards independence. They all lagged behind educated Indian opinion, but in spite of recurrent reactionary influences they were always in the right direction. Whatever the views of individual statesmen or officials may have been, it is now clear that the consistent British purpose was the gradual development of self-governing institutions.

At one time it was the fashion amongst Indian writers and politicians to contend that every concession to Indian aspiration had been wrung from a reluctant Britain by force. Much interest attaches, therefore, to the early reforms effected when Britain was in the heyday of her power and in particular to the Indian Councils Act of 1861.

Britain then was in a position of absolute and unquestioned authority. The Mutiny had been crushed; those who had rebelled were completely cowed. The British Government could, with impunity, have completely disregarded Indian sentiment. When Lord Canning, the Governor-General, was instructed to submit proposals for reshaping the Central Government, his own instincts were in a sense reactionary. In 1833 the power of legislation had been withdrawn from the Governments of Bombay and Madras and vested solely in the Governor-General in Council. The Councillors were nearly always Bengal Civil Servants, and the Council was thus without practical experience of Madras and Bombay, even though it had to legislate for those Presidencies. To remedy this difficulty, in 1853 ‘the Council when acting in its legislative capacity was enlarged by the addition of six new members called legislative members of whom two were English judges of the Calcutta Supreme Court while the other four were officials appointed by the local governments of Madras, Bombay, Bengal and Agra’. This, according to the Montagu-Chelmsford report, ‘was the first recognition of the principle of local representation in the Indian legislature’. As a result of this arrangement, which was introduced by Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General and his Executive Councillors might well find themselves in a minority when the Council met for legislative purposes. To remove this difficulty, Lord Canning proposed the creation of three separate Legislative Councils, one at Calcutta, one at Bombay and one at Madras while his own autocratic temperament also led him to suggest that the Executive Council of the Governor-General should be abolished, the Governor-General being left in sole charge with the aid of secretaries chosen by him. After two or three years’ experience, Canning was persuaded of the unwisdom of his proposal to abolish the Executive Council and now suggested the establishment of something rather like the British Cabinet in which members would individually control particular departments. In the meantime, the admission of Indians to the inner councils of government had become a live issue. It had been realised that one of the causes of the Mutiny was the wide gulf which existed between educated Indians and the Government, and much thought was given as to how best to bring about closer contact. Sir Bartle Frere in a Minute written in 1860 and quoted in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, deals with this subject very cogently:

‘The addition of the native element has, I think, become necessary owing to our diminished opportunities of learning through indirect channels what the natives think of our measures, and how the native community will be affected by them. It is useless to speculate on the many causes which have conspired to deprive us of the advantages which our predecessors enjoyed in this respect. Of the fact there can be no doubt, and no one will, I think, object to the only obvious means of regaining in part the advantages which we have lost, unless he is prepared for the perilous experiment of continuing to legislate for millions of people, with few means of knowing, except by a rebellion, whether the laws suit them or not.

‘The durbar of a native Prince is nothing more than a council very similar to that which I have described. To it under a good ruler all have access, very considerable licence of speech is permitted, and it is in fact the channel from which the ruler learns how his measures are likely to affect his subjects and may hear of discontent before it becomes disaffection.’

The outcome of all these discussions was the Indian Councils Act of 1861. By that Act the Governor-General’s Council was to consist of five members, three of whom must have held official positions in India for not less than ten years. Decisions were to be taken by a majority, but the Governor-General was, as previously, given the power to override the Council in matters affecting public safety, tranquillity or interest. This was a wide exception, but in practice the views of the majority of the Council nearly always prevailed. The departmental system was introduced in the sense that each member of the Council became individually responsible for a certain number of departments, and this resulted in a considerable gain in efficiency. By the same Act the Legislative Council, which previously had been a purely official body, was expanded to include between six and twelve members nominated by the Governor-General, of whom not less than half must be non-official. Thus for the first time persons not in the service of the Company were admitted to the supreme legislative authority. Although the Act left the matter open, most of the non-officials chosen were, in fact, Indians, and so the new system can properly be regarded as the first step towards Indianisation. The functions of the new Legislative Council were, however, severely restricted, for it was considered that the Legislature created by Lord Dalhousie had overreached itself by asking questions and discussing administration. Henceforth the Legislative Council was not to be a miniature parliament but purely a legislative body. At the same time, Provincial Legislative Councils on somewhat similar lines were to be established. The existence of the Provincial Legislative Councils was not to exclude the right of the Governor-General’s Legislative Council to legislate for the whole of India or for any part thereof.

The next important forward step was taken in the field of local self-government. We are not concerned here with the detailed history of local self-government in India, but only with the delegation of power from the Provincial Governments and with the introduction of the electoral principle. As we have seen earlier, whenever a strong central authority has existed in India, village self-government has declined and this tendency had been exaggerated by the chaos of the eighteenth century. In the two decades after the Mutiny sporadic attempts were made to introduce measures of self-government and to provide for the raising of cesses for local purposes. In view of the allegation that the British Government was indifferent to education, it is interesting to note that in 1871 a proposal to raise local cesses for primary education and roads in Bengal was so strongly opposed by the Bengali public that as far as education was concerned it had to be dropped—a procedure repeated in most districts sixty years later when the Bengal Primary Education Act was rendered infructuous by local unwillingness to pay. In most provinces between 1870 and 1880 local committees were nominated, each intended to deal with a specific subject such as communications, health, education and the like. Although the committees were under government control, they were intended, in the words of the resolution of Lord Mayo’s Government, to ‘afford opportunities for the development of self-government, for strengthening municipal institutions and for the association of natives and Europeans to a greater extent than heretofore in the administration of affairs’. In Bengal, for example, the proceeds of government ferries were handed over to local committees for expenditure on roads and bridges. These committees were nominated by the Government and worked under official control and had no power to levy cesses or raise funds. The liberal-minded Lord Ripon carried this train of thought a stage further and proposed the establishment of local self-governing institutions, largely on English lines, but as far as possible making use of any indigenous existing institutions. He stated specifically that they were intended ‘not primarily with a view to improvement of administration . . . but as a measure of political and popular education’. The resolution was implemented in different ways in the different provinces. In Madras, for example, the new system was grafted on to the village panchayats; in the Central Provinces the village headmen were to form an electoral college for the local bodies; while yet other provinces merely added elected elements to the existing committees. In Bengal, although a considerable proportion of the members of the district and local boards were elected, the District Magistrates were to be the chairmen, and the public for long remained largely indifferent to the boards. On the whole Indians of first-class ability took little interest in these local bodies and the advance in local self-government did not provide the political education for which Lord Ripon had hoped. It did, however, establish representative and elective principles.

By 1892, when the next great constitutional change took place, the Indian National Congress had for several years provided a limited class of Indians with valuable political education. Lord Dufferin, the Governor-General, felt himself able to propose that a certain number of members of the Provincial Councils should be elected. Having explained his plan ‘for the enlargement of our provincial councils, for the enhancement of their status, the multiplication of their functions, the partial introduction into them of the elective principle, and the liberalisation of their general character as political institutions’, Lord Dufferin went on to make it quite clear that he was not aiming at an approach to the English parliamentary system. Such a system would, he held, be incompatible with the responsibility of Great Britain for India. As long as that responsibility lasted, each Provincial Governor must have the power to take the ultimate decision on all important questions and for the same reason it was necessary, in Lord Dufferin’s view, that the nominated members in the Council should outnumber the elected members. In this way the Government would secure greater contact with educated Indian opinion, while still retaining the powers necessary to carry out its responsibilities.

The question of election of the members of the Council was the subject of prolonged discussion in the course of which Lord Salisbury gave this famous warning. ‘We must be careful lest, by the application of occidental machinery, we bring into power not the strong, natural, vigorous, effective elements of Indian society but the more artificial and weakly elements, which we ourselves have made and brought into prominence. It would be a great evil if in any system of Government which we gradually develop, the really strong portions of Indian society did not obtain that share in the Government to which their natural position among their own people traditionally entitles them.’

Ultimately a compromise was reached. Certain bodies, such as municipalities, commercial associations and universities were given the right to suggest representatives in the Provincial Legislative Council and the Government would, if it saw fit, nominate the person suggested. In practice the suggestions were invariably accepted, so that the new procedure was tantamount to election. The constituencies, however, were not territorial divisions but associations of limited classes of people. The new arrangement was made in the typically British empirical way, for it was merely laid down in the despatch transmitting the Act of 1892 to the Government of India that the intentions of Parliament were:

‘Where corporations have been established with definite powers, upon a recognised administrative basis, or where associations have been formed upon a substantial community of legitimate interests, professional, commercial or territorial, the governor-general and the local governors might find convenience and advantage in consulting from time to time such bodies, and in entertaining at their discretion an expression of their views and recommendations with regard to the selection of members in whose qualifications they might be disposed to confide.’

For the Imperial Legislative Council it was laid down that four of the ten non-official members must be chosen by the non-official additional members of the Councils in Madras, Bombay and the other provinces; one was to be chosen by the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce, while the remaining five seats were to be filled by officials nominated by the Governor-General. At the same time the powers of the Provincial Councils were expanded, in as much as they were given the right to ask questions and to discuss, though not to vote on, the budget. The Act represented a substantial step forward and on the whole justified itself by results. In the words of the Montagu Chelmsford Report, ‘Criticism had mostly been temperate though not always well informed. Useful information had been often and valuable suggestions not infrequently received; and the association of the leaders of the non-official public in the management of affairs even in a restricted and rudimentary form had afforded an outlet for national aspirations and some slight degree of education in the art of Government’.

The next constitutional advance was taken on the initiative of Lord Minto with the support of the Secretary of State, John Morley. Indian politicians had begun to demand greater representation in the Legislative Councils as well as the appointment of Indians to the Executive Councils of the Viceroy and Provincial Governors. Lord Minto—a Viceroy who aimed at combining firm government and repression of lawlessness with a progressive policy—was favourably disposed towards that claim, and after two years of discussion the Morley-Minto Reforms were passed into law in 1909. The most spectacular change effected by them was the abandonment of the official majorities in the Provincial Legislative Councils; in Bengal there was indeed to be an absolute majority of elected members. Election would not be by general territorial constituencies but by municipalities, district boards, chambers of commerce, landholders and other groups of special interests. This recognition for the first time of the full principle of election was important, but still more significant was the establishment of separate electorates for Muslims. Their claim had been firmly stated by a deputation to the Viceroy in 1906 and Lord Minto had replied in the following terms:

‘The pith of your address, as I understand it, is a claim that under any system of representation, whether it affects a municipality or a district board or a legislative council, in which it is proposed to introduce or increase an electoral organisation, the Muhammadan community should be represented as a community. You point out that in many cases electoral bodies as now constituted cannot be expected to return a Muhammadan candidate, and that if by chance they did so, it could only be at the sacrifice of such a candidate’s views to those of a majority opposed to his community whom he would in no way represent; and you justly claim that your position should be estimated not only on your numerical strength, but in respect to the political importance of your community and the service it has rendered to the Empire. I am entirely in accord with you. Please do not misunderstand me. I make no attempt to indicate by what means the representation of communities can be obtained, but I am as firmly convinced as I believe you to be that any electoral representation in India would be doomed to mischievous failure which aimed at granting a personal enfranchisement regardless of the beliefs and traditions of the communities composing the population of this continent.’

Morley tried to persuade the Muslims to accept a scheme of reservation of seats with joint electorates. They were, however, insistent that such electorates would not elect Muslims who would satisfactorily represent their community. The Muslim claim was admitted and they never afterwards abandoned it.

In the Imperial Legislative Council the official majority was to be maintained, but the number of non-official members was considerably increased; and here, too, the principle of election was accepted. Moreover, the scope of discussion in the Council was greatly extended; the estimates were to be presented to the Council, resolutions could be moved on official matters and supplementary questions were to be allowed. At the same time, the Secretary of State announced his intention of appointing an Indian member to the Governor-General’s Council. This intention was in due course carried out in spite of the opposition of the majority of that Council, and Mr. Sinha, later Lord Sinha, became the first Indian member of that Council.

These reforms were a substantial advance and satisfied moderate Indian politicians. They were, in fact, decisive in that they set India on the path to parliamentary government, though many contemporary politicians, including John Morley, failed to recognise this fact. It is, indeed, difficult to understand what Morley visualised as the next step when he stated in the House of Lords: ‘If it could be said that this chapter of reforms led directly or necessarily to the establishment of a parliamentary system in India, I, for one, would have nothing to do with it.’

Equally difficult is it to know what he meant when he wrote as follows: ‘Not one whit more than you do I think it desirable or possible, or even conceivable, to adapt English political institutions to the nations who inhabit India. Assuredly not in your day or mine. But the spirit of English institutions is a different thing, and it is a thing that we cannot escape even if we wished . . . because British constituencies are the masters, and they will assuredly insist—all parties alike—on the spirit of their own political system being applied to India.’ What he failed to see was that the spirit of the system would, rightly or wrongly but inevitably lead, to the establishment in India of parliamentary government. In this matter Gokhale and his colleagues had a clearer vision than John Morley.

The next step was taken in 1919 when Parliament gave effect to the recommendations of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report and in reversal of Morley’s attitude accepted parliamentary, responsible self-government as the goal of India’s development. The authors of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report did not minimise the difficulties in the way of reaching this goal. They recognised that ignorance, the tyranny of the caste system, Hindu-Muslim antagonism and many other factors would present serious obstacles. Nevertheless they believed that India must no longer live a sheltered existence, ‘that the placid contentment of the masses must be disturbed’ so that the people of India might become fit for ‘a richer gift than any we have yet bestowed on them’.

Perhaps the most important feature of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms was so unspectacular that few people noticed it—the classification of certain subjects as provincial and others as central. Such a division was, of course, a condition precedent even to the limited degree of power now to be transferred to provincial ministers, but more important still it was the first step on the road to federation—the first breach in that unitary character of the Indian administration which had been established after the bitter struggles of Madras and Bombay against the authority of the Governor-General in the eighteenth century.

This devolution made possible the system of dual government generally known as dyarchy, established in the provinces by the 1919 Act. The subjects under the control of the provinces were divided into two groups, known as ‘transferred’ and ‘reserved’ subjects. The ‘transferred’ subjects would be under the charge of Indian ministers, and the Governors would normally act on their advice in respect of them. The intention was that ministers would regard themselves as responsible to the Legislature—as an embryonic ‘responsible government’. In the case of the ‘reserved’ subjects the government would go on very much as before and Governors were given the necessary powers to secure the passage of any legislation necessary to their handling of these subjects. Since dyarchy was regarded largely as a process of training for Indian ministers and legislators, the more important subjects such as law and order and finance were ‘reserved’, while the ‘transferred’ subjects included what are generally known as the nation-building departments. Nation building, unfortunately, depends on money and this division naturally gave rise to trouble, but there does not appear to be any reason for thinking that the official finance members tried to starve the ‘transferred’ departments. As it happened, a period of financial stringency soon set in and all departments, whether ‘reserved’ or ‘transferred’, had to suffer retrenchment. In such a period Indian ministers in the ‘transferred’ departments must often have been irritated by the wise financial orthodoxy of the Indian Civil Service. On the whole, however, relations between members in charge of ‘reserved’ departments and Indian ministers were good, and, if anything, the latter tended to lean too heavily on their financial colleagues.

The 1919 Act retained the system of separate electorates for Muslims. The authors of the scheme had a strong aversion to such electorates in principle, but they saw no practical alternative, particularly as the Congress itself had admitted the need for such electorates in the Lucknow Pact of 1916.

At the centre the principle of dyarchy was not introduced and over the whole field the British Secretary of State continued to exercise superintendence and control. The Central Assembly, however, was reconstituted so as to secure in it a substantial non-official majority. Both at the centre and in the provinces the franchise was broadened and general or special territorial constituencies were introduced.

To put it briefly, the 1919 Act was a limited experiment in the parliamentary system, under many safeguards and restrictions, but with the avowed object of leading in due course to full responsible government. Of the stages of that advance the British Parliament was to be the judge and it would naturally be influenced by the way in which India worked the experiment of self-government now made. The reactions to the Act and the working of dyarchy will be discussed in the next chapter, but we must here note that of the six steps to independence referred to earlier, five had now been taken, namely, the Indian Councils Act 1861, the establishment of local self-government, the Indian Councils Act 1892, the Morley-Minto Reforms and the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. The inevitability of British gradualness was in fact becoming apparent.

Chapter XXXIV

India Under Dyarchy

As we have seen, in March 1920 Mr. Gandhi issued a manifesto advocating non-co-operation, but was strongly opposed by Lokamanya Tilak, who proposed working the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms Act ‘for all it is worth’ and so ‘accelerating the grant of full Responsible Government’. Tilak died before the Special Congress Session, called in September 1920 to consider this matter, and, in spite of the opposition of C. R. Das and other moderate Congress leaders, Mr. Gandhi won the day. By the time of the Nagpur Session in December 1920, the temper of the country had grown worse, and Mr. Gandhi had still further established his ascendancy. The new spirit was illustrated by an incident concerning Colonel Wedgwood, well known for his sympathies with Indian aspirations. At Nagpur he begged the Congress not to adopt a policy of non-co-operation which would alienate their friends in England. ‘Hardly had he resumed his seat,’ according to the official historian of the Congress, ‘when up rose a voice in reply. . . . “We have no friends outside India; let there be no mistake about that; our salvation lies in our own hands.” This was indeed the new spirit of India; self-government was something to be seized as a right and not accepted as a gift. It led naturally to boycott of the Councils, resignation of titles, withdrawal of students from government educational institutions and the abandonment by lawyers of their practices. All this, together with the more formal civil-disobedience movement inaugurated by the Ahmadabad Congress in 1921, led to widespread disorder. The tragedy of Chauri-Chaura, where a number of policemen were burned to death by an infuriated mob of civil resisters, seems to have given Mr. Gandhi a severe shock. Once again he was surprised that non-co-operation could not remain non-violent. The Civil Disobedience movement was suspended and in March 1922 its author and inspirer was arrested and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

In conformity with the Congress resolution, Congressmen took no part in the 1920 elections for the new Councils. Not by any means all Indian patriots approved of this boycott. The Liberals, who were, in many cases, men of experience who had helped to work the 1909 reforms, now filled the seats of the Legislative Councils which the Congress would not accept. Thoughtful Congressmen soon realised not only that their attitude was unsound but also that their absence from the Councils deprived them of the first place in the public eye and that their influence was consequently declining. In 1923 C. R. Das, who had never agreed with the boycott of the Councils, returned to the charge and, in Mr. Gandhi’s absence in jail, persuaded the Congress to stand for the next Council elections. When Mr. Gandhi was released from jail in 1924 on account of ill health, he failed to dissuade the Congress leaders from the new policy of Council entry, and until 1928 he therefore devoted himself mainly to what was called ‘constructive’ work and left the formulation and execution of policy to the other leaders.

Although C. R. Das had persuaded the Congress to enter the Council, they did not share his motives, but accepted his advice primarily in order to wreck the Constitution. In two provinces their tactics were so successful that dyarchy had to be temporarily abandoned in favour of rule by the Governor. In the other provinces the Congress did not succeed in making dyarchy unworkable, nor did they wholly nullify its educative value. It will be remembered that the intention of the authors of this scheme was, firstly, to give Indian ministers experience without running risks with the vital departments of the state; and, secondly, to train the electorate and the rank and file of council members in electoral and parliamentary procedure. It has become fashionable to condemn this system as illogical and unworkable; in practice it worked reasonably well under extraordinary difficulties and it justified its purpose. It is true that, thanks to the organised obstruction of the Congress Party, ministers could look for no support from the majority, whatever their policy might be. They perforce turned to their official colleagues and to the nominated members of the Council. They thus lost the opportunity of learning the technique of responsible government in the technical sense. Nevertheless, they acquired valuable experience in the art of administration, and it must be remembered that few Indians possessed such experience before dyarchy. Moreover, they enacted a great deal of sound, progressive legislation. The system also gave Indian legislators the opportunity of learning parliamentary procedure and—in spite of the obstructive attitude of the majority—of acquiring something of the parliamentary spirit. There is room for reasonable difference of opinion as to the suitability of the parliamentary system to India; but if India was, in fact, to embark on self-government in accordance with that system, it was essential that the electorate should gain some familiarity with the mechanism of representation. Ballot boxes were quite new in India and the people had to be taught what they meant. Such a training was provided by dyarchy, and in the view of the writer that system was justified by its results.

While dyarchy was thus being worked under difficulties, certain other important developments took place, the first of which was progress towards Indianisation of the services. In 1924 it was agreed, on the basis of the recommendations of the Lee Commission, that recruitment of Indians to the Indian Civil Service should proceed at such a pace that within fifteen years half the members of that Service would be Indian. This recommendation was not liked by the I.C.S. at the time, but in view of the rapidity with which India was to progress towards self-government it was undoubtedly right. Incidentally, it was a striking proof of Britain’s honesty of purpose. In the military sphere greater caution was naturally exercised, but good foundations were laid for the rapid expansion of the cadre of Indian commissioned officers which took place during the Second World War.

An equally important but less spectacular development was the gradual recognition of India’s right to be represented in international conferences. Such representation at Imperial Conferences had been normal from 1918 onwards, and soon after this India took her place in her own right in the League of Nations and the International Labour Office. Nationalist Indians at this time were apt to be legalistic in their approach and seldom realised that by these changes of procedure India was in fact attaining a large measure of self-government. Another development of this nature between the two wars was contained in the Fiscal Convention of 1919. Under this Convention it was recognised that although the Secretary of State still exercised general superintendence and control over the Government of India, that Government should consider Indian rather than British interests when dealing with fiscal matters, and that whenever the Government of India and the Indian Legislature were in agreement over such matters, the Secretary of State would not interfere. This Convention led in 1921 to the policy of ‘discriminating protection’ which did much to develop Indian industry at the expense of the British exporters. In all these ways India took great strides during the period of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. Indian politicians, however, paid little attention to these developments and concentrated almost wholly on formal political advance.

The next constitutional step forward was the appointment of the Simon Commission; but before considering the work of that body it seems desirable to refer to the three main features of the years just preceding it. In the first place this was, in many ways, the unhappiest phase of the Indo-British connection. Amongst the intelligentsia the belief in the honesty of British intentions, which was a characteristic of the earlier Indian nationalists, largely disappeared; and a large proportion of the educated classes developed an almost pathological anti-British complex. British officials, on the other hand, perhaps not unnaturally, began to regard educated Indians with suspicion and to classify all Indian political leaders as ‘agitators’. For a time, indeed, British and Indians seemed to be incapable of understanding each other’s point of view. Congress politicians minimised the difficulties of self-government and were determined to have it at once, while the British Government were no less firmly resolved to move step by step. Both attitudes were justifiable. If Indians had not been impatient, they would have been regarded as unripe for self-government; while if the British Government had allowed itself to be rushed it would have shown lack of a sense of responsibility. The rapid growth of good feeling between Britain and India after India became independent suggests that the antagonism between the two people before the transfer of power was to some extent superficial and that there existed a great deal of basic good will, which both parties knew would prevail when the political issue had been cleared out of the way. Be that as it may, for nearly thirty years suspicion and antagonism characterised the relations between Englishmen and educated Indians.

The second characteristic of this phase was that the masses were for the first time brought into the struggle. Before the first war, except where communal questions arose, Indian politics were the concern of a few intellectuals. By 1930, at least in some provinces a considerable proportion of the rural population were profoundly interested in the demand for swaraj. They might not understand the deeper issues involved, but the slogans and symbols of the Congress had caught their imagination and before the end of the period pictures of Mr. Gandhi, Pandit Nehru or Subhas Chandra Bose were to be found in most Hindu village homes. By the beginning of the Second World War it was no longer true to say that the villager cared little and knew nothing about Indian national politics. Mr. Gandhi had been the dominant figure in India during two decades, and, whatever dissensions might occur at high levels in the Congress Party, it was to Mr. Gandhi alone that the Hindu masses looked.

The third feature of this period was the growth of the great cleavage between the Hindus and the Muslims which was at a later stage to make partition unavoidable. This communal antagonism did not appear in the first few years of our period. At that time the adventitious circumstances described earlier had united Hindus and Muslims in common hostility to the British—but that co-operation was short-lived. In 1921 the Moplah rising in which the Arab-descended Muslims of Malabar not only rebelled against the Government but also made war on their Hindu neighbours, destroyed all hope of communal harmony between the two communities. In that rebellion ‘murders, forcible conversions, desecrations of temples, outrages upon women, pillage, arson and destruction were perpetrated freely and, as might be expected, the barbarities practised had an immediate reaction on Hindu-Moslem relations throughout India’.

Apart from the troubles in Malabar, other factors were at work. In the first place, however emphatically Mr. Gandhi might decree that non-co-operation must be non-violent, the Congress movement had, in fact, created a spirit of violence and defiance of authority. Such a spirit could clearly not be confined to the channels in which its political leaders intended it to operate and it soon affected all parts of society. When the unnatural union brought about by the Khilafat movement came to an end, Hindu-Muslim antagonism, always present below the surface, now flamed up into open violence all over India. It was naturally aggravated by the militant Hinduism which had been an important element in the Congress Party ever since the appearance of Tilak on the scene, and unfortunately certain aggressive Hindu politicians chose this time of tension and disorder to launch the suddhi and sangathan. movements.

The object of the suddhi movement was to purify or reconvert those who had become Muhammadans or Christians. However unobjectionable in principle such an aim might be, the launching of this movement at this particular time was regarded by the Muslims as an organised attack on Islam; certainly to those who saw it in operation it appeared to be the embodiment of militant Hinduism. This interpretation was confirmed by the close conjunction of the suddhi with the sangathan movement which aimed at imbuing Hindus with an aggressive and martial spirit and at teaching them drill, gymnastics and sword play. The author of Pakistan—the official publication of the Pakistan Government—alleges that the aim of the suddhi and sangathan movements was ‘to reduce the Moslem population by a process of reconversion . . . and to organise a private army to exterminate the remaining population’. This is perhaps the language of hyperbole and bitterness, but the author knows from personal observation that the effect of these movements, and the counter-movements started by the Muslims, was to keep up continuous political and communal tension.

Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the official historian of the Congress, records that in 1924 ‘the bane of the year was the outbreak of communal troubles in various places—especially at Delhi, Gulbarga, Nagpur, Lucknow, Shahjahanpur, Allahabad, Jubbulpore, and, worst of all, at Kohat. The Kohat riots really broke the backbone of India. A committee was appointed to investigate the causes and conditions of the riot—composed of Gandhi and Shaukat Ali. The two produced a report but unfortunately they differed in respect of the parties on which they fixed the blame for the disturbances. It is a decade since the events of the 9th and 10th September 1924, but the perusal of the reports of the Kohat outrages, published . . . immediately after the riot, sends a thrill of horror through the reader. We cannot review the events beyond saying that after the shootings and carnage of the 9th and 10th September, a special train had to remove 4,000 Hindus, of whom 2,600 were living for two months afterwards on the charity of Rawalpindi and 1,400 in other places’.

Mr. Gandhi then as always set his face resolutely against this orgy of communalism and fasted for twenty-one days after the Kohat happenings, but the forces at work were too strong for him, and for some years, particularly in Bengal, the atmosphere was never normal. Always one had the sense of a riot or an outrage just round the corner. It is not the intention of the author to apportion blame between the Hindus and the Muslims, but he would be less than candid if he did not record his view, based on personal observation, that a prime factor in these tragic episodes was the spirit of lawlessness generated by the Congress propaganda.

It is not surprising that against this background of bitterness the various attempts to find a constitutional formula on which Hindus and Muslims could agree failed completely. In 1924 the Muslim League met apart from the Congress for the first time since 1919 and laid down six ‘basic principles’. The two most important of them were that which dealt with separate electorates and that which insisted that the new constitution should be federal ‘with full and complete provincial autonomy’. In popular language, the provinces were to be strong and the centre, where the Muslims feared the effect of the great Hindu majority weightage, was to be weak. This was henceforth the Muslim League theme song—except on one occasion in 1935. The 1924 proposals of the League received no serious consideration by the Congress even though both parties were in accord in desiring parliamentary self-government, and it is possible that the Congress thus lost the last practical chance of preserving the unity of India.

In 1927 a Commission under the chairmanship of Sir John Simon was appointed to examine the working of the Government of India Act and to make any necessary recommendations for its modification. The Commission carried out its work under the most unfavourable circumstances and had no chance whatsoever of propounding a solution acceptable alike to Hindus and Muslims. Indian nationalists objected strongly to the appointment of a Commission, consisting only of British M.P.s, to examine the Indian problem and make proposals for the next step forward. They accordingly decided to boycott the Commission and declined to participate in the Committees elected by the Provincial Legislatures, or in the Central Committee appointed by the Governor-General for the purpose of discussions with the Simon Commission ‘as joint free conferences’. This decision was soon seen to have the unfortunate practical result that the British Government would have no means of knowing what Congress wanted. There was also the secondary consideration that the co-operators would secure the limelight of publicity to the detriment of the Congress non-co-operators. The Congress, therefore, established a body known as the ‘All Parties Conference’ to ‘consider and determine the principles of the constitution of India’. This Committee, under the chairmanship of Pandit Motilal Nehru, produced the Nehru Report in 1928. That Report contained evidence of considerable constructive thought on the constitutional problem, but it left many vital questions unresolved. It accepted the goal of dominion status ‘without restricting the liberty of action of those political parties whose goal is complete independence’. It envisaged a federation of India in due course, but it made no attempt to consider what the principles of the federation should be. It recommended direct election by adult suffrage, but it made no serious attempt to deal with the problem of minorities and it rejected the principle of separate communal electorates, which the Muslims regarded as vital. Nor would its authors agree to ‘weightage’ in excess of numerical strength for minority communities. There was, in fact, never the slightest chance that the Nehru Report would secure the support of the Muslims or provide the basis for an Indian Constitution.

A few months later, in January 1929, the All-India Muslim Conference—the most representative Muslim Assembly then known—set forth the demands of the community. Four main points were emphasised. The Constitution of India must be federal, with complete autonomy and residuary powers vested in the constituent provinces; there must be separate communal electorates; Muslims must have ‘weightage’ where they were in a minority; and Muslims must have a statutory share in the Central and Provincial cabinets. These were the minimum demands of the Muslim League from this time forth, and they were completely at variance with the principles of the Nehru Report.

The Simon Commission produced a report which many authorities regard as the finest analysis of Indian conditions in the twentieth century yet written and it put forward a logical basis for further advance. The gist of its recommendations, published in May 1930, was fourfold. In the first place, the ultimate constitution of India was to be federal so that it could include the Indian states as well as British India. Secondly, such a federation could not ‘spring into being at a bound’ but must grow out of a healthy development of self-government in the provinces. Thirdly, there must therefore be the maximum devolution of full responsibility to Provincial Ministries immediately; and, lastly, while the Provincial ministers and Councils were learning by experience to bear the full weight of new and heavy responsibility, there must be a strong, mainly official, Central Government. In the provincial field the Commission therefore recommended that dyarchy should be replaced by full responsible cabinet government, except that the Governor should have the right to intervene for certain limited purposes. Law and order would thus be transferred to ministerial control, even though this was recognised as involving risk. The Central Government was to remain strong, and the Governor-General’s Executive Council was not to be, in the technical sense, responsible to the Assembly. Nevertheless, the official block was almost to disappear; and since the ultimate goal was federation, members of the Central Legislature would be elected by the Provincial Councils.

There was much wisdom in these proposals, but they received little support. On the British side, the un-co-operative attitude of the Congress under the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and the growth of disorder and communal bitterness had seriously undermined British faith in the capacity of Indians to govern themselves. On the Hindu side, the proposals were bitterly resented for their implication that India still needed a period of tutelage.

In the period between the appointment of the Simon Commission and the publication of its recommendations an unexpected event deprived the report of much of its significance. In October 1929 the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, after consultation with the British Government, announced ‘that the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress is the attainment of Dominion status’. This announcement was at first well received in India, but important sections of British opinion regarded it as wholly improper while the Simon Commission was still sitting. That Commission naturally did not associate itself with this announcement and it was generally felt in India that Lord Irwin had in fact ‘pigeon-holed’ the Simon Report in advance.

Lord Irwin’s gesture completely failed to produce the pacifying effect for which he had hoped. Congress leaders immediately challenged him as to whether his pronouncement meant that a Dominion status constitution for India was at once to be framed or not, and, when he was unable to give them any such assurance, Congress authorised its Working Committee, whenever it might deem fit, to launch a programme of civil disobedience including non-payment of taxes. At the end of 1928 Congress had in fact issued an ultimatum. Unless the principles of the Nehru Report were accepted by 31st December 1929 the Congress would organise a campaign of non-violent non-co-operation. The Working Committee was now, in fact, authorised to implement this resolution, and in April 1930, a month before the publication of the Simon Report, Mr. Gandhi launched the Civil Disobedience campaign.

It is important to understand the issue on which the Congress were determined to fight. In 1917 the British Government had irrevocably declared that responsible self-government was their goal for India, and in 1919 they had taken an important practical step in that direction. Mr. Gandhi, who a few months earlier had been prepared to co-operate, abruptly rejected the 1919 scheme of reform and committed the Congress to a policy of non-co-operation. In spite of this rebuff and of the bloodshed and disorder to which the Congress policy had led, in 1927 the British Government again decided to make a further advance and set up the Simon Commission to consider how this could best be done. When it was seen that even this did not satisfy Indian opinion, Lord Irwin made his famous ‘Dominion status’ announcement which seemed to be in agreement with the aims set forth in the Nehru Report. The only disagreement was as to timing. His Majesty’s Government proposed to proceed step by step, whereas the Congress wanted to achieve the goal at once. It was on this narrow issue that Mr. Gandhi launched a campaign which was to produce seventeen years of disorder and violence and which permanently impaired the traditional Hindu respect for authority. An Englishman who loves freedom must sympathise with the feelings of the Congress, but he cannot praise the wisdom or foresight of their leaders in 1930 and the following years. During the five years after the Congress declaration of war, two strongly conflicting processes were at work. On the one hand, through a long-drawn-out succession of conferences and committees, political leaders in England and India sought for a peaceful settlement which would satisfy all interests, while at the same time the Congress and other militant bodies were conducting something akin to a rebellion. The Civil Disobedience movement gave a lead to all the unhealthy elements in the country. In Bengal and certain other provinces educated Hindu youths let their emotions run riot, and respect for the sanctity of human life was undermined. By a curious perversion of logic the most venerated scriptures were used by terrorists as recruiting manuals, and young idealists and patriots were thus pressed into the service of a cult of murder. The Congress did not openly defend terrorism, but its leaders seldom condemned it in unqualified terms, and in fact nearly all the prominent figures in the terrorist movement were closely connected with the district Congress Committees.

The atmosphere of hysteria generated by the Civil Disobedience movement and by the continual shouting of provocative slogans, which was one of the features of that movement, combined with Muslim fear and intransigence to produce continuous communal tension, which frequently led to bloody riots. All this disorder was the inevitable result of the Civil Disobedience movement; and however pacific the intentions of Mr. Gandhi and some of his colleagues may have been, they should have foreseen the disastrous results of their campaign. Had they done so, they would perhaps not have considered it justified by the narrow issue between them and the British Government.

During these unhappy years three Round Table Conferences and a Joint Select Committee of Parliament formed the prelude to the Government of India Act, 1935. The proceedings of the three Round Table Conferences are only relevant to our purpose in so far as they show the patience and thoroughness of the British approach to the problem of self-government for India and the apparent impossibility of securing agreement amongst the major Indian parties. The Congress remained away from the first Round Table Conference held in 1930, but all other Indian parties including the princes were present. Surprising progress was made. There was general agreement that the new constitution should be federal, and the princes evinced great enthusiasm for such a plan. All the Indian representatives stood for Dominion status and assumed that the Government of India must be in the parliamentary form. At the same time the Federal Structure Sub-Committee recognised that in the Central Government dyarchy must be maintained during the transition phase. The Conference dissolved with high hopes, but general agreement had been reached only because of the absence of the Congress Party.

Before the second Round Table Conference took place in 1931 Lord Irwin had brought about a political truce and Mr. Gandhi was therefore able to attend. His presence did not make for a settlement. He would not accept dyarchy at the centre; nor did he contribute anything to the solution of the problem of communal representation; he insisted that he and the Congress represented all the Indian people, and he would not recognise the standing of the minorities’ representatives. A deadlock was reached, and Mr. Gandhi announced ‘with deep sorrow and deeper humiliation his failure to secure an agreement with the communities concerned’. He refused to commit Congress to unqualified acceptance of a decision by the British Prime Minister of the communal problem which he and his colleagues had failed to solve.

After the conference the British Government made a communal award (17th August 1932) which created separate electorates not only for Hindus and Muslims but also for the Untouchables—and, incidentally, for the British. The award was at once attacked from several sides in India. The orthodox Hindus regarded it as too favourable to the Muslims; the Sikhs disapproved of it; and Mr. Gandhi declared a fast unto death against that part of it which provided separate electorates for the Untouchables, or Depressed Classes as they are now more politely called. Mr. Gandhi’s fast induced a state of hysteria throughout India, and in the end the Depressed Class leaders gave in. A scheme was accepted, known as the Poona Pact, under which certain seats would be reserved for them; after a system of sifting candidates through primary elections by a Scheduled Caste electorate, the Scheduled Caste representatives would be elected by all Hindus. Even the sifting by primary elections was to be for a period of ten years only.

By the time of the third Round Table Conference in November and December 1932 the political truce was at an end, terrorism was in full swing, and, though much constructive thinking took place inside the conference, in the absence of the Congress it could achieve little. The three conferences nevertheless provided material for the Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament, whose proposals were to be the basis of the new Government of India Act, 1935.

The profound importance of that Act did not arise primarily from the transfer of power to Indian hands which it effected, for that was but a necessary continuation of a process deliberately set in motion years earlier. Far more significant was the fact that it finally established the principle that India should be a federal rather than a unitary state and that it should ultimately be governed by the system of responsible government as practised in Britain and the Dominions.

The relative merits of a federal or a unitary government for India had long been canvassed and the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, by their permanent allocation of certain powers to the provinces, in effect paved the way for federation. The Simon Commission proposed acceptance of the federal principle, but Lord Irwin and his Government still felt that they ‘must look eventually to the emergence of a unitary responsible government’. Indian opinion was divided on this subject, but the Congress was still far from happy about the federal idea. The Act nevertheless created autonomous provinces, exercising jurisdiction not by delegation from the centre but in their own right and free from Central supervision. India, in fact, became a federal state, even though what is commonly called ‘the federal part of the Act’ never came into operation.

Responsible government in the technical sense, subject to certain qualifications, was established in the provinces not so much as the result of any section of the Act as by the Instruments of Instructions issued to Governors with the approval of both houses of the British Parliament. In those Instructions the Governor was directed to choose his ministers in consultation with ‘the person who in his judgment is likely to command a favourable majority in the legislature and thereafter in general to be guided by the advice of his ministers’. The scheme of responsible government in the provinces was, however, limited in two important directions. In the first place, the Governor was personally charged with certain ‘special responsibilities’, the most important of which related to ‘prevention of any grave menace to the peace or tranquillity of the Province’; ‘the safeguarding of the legislative rights of minorities’; and the protection of British commercial interests from discrimination. In these and certain other matters the Governor was required to exercise ‘his individual judgment’ after consultation with his ministers, but there were also certain matters with regard to which the Governor was required to act in his discretion—that is, without any obligation to consult his ministers. On paper, the limitations on the power of the ministers looked formidable; subsequent events were to show how little they meant in practice. The minorities—as well as the British business community—were indeed apt to complain in later years that Governors were unwilling to use their powers or to carry out their special responsibilities, even when injustice was clearly being done. In reality, the 1935 Act established effective responsible government in the provinces over a very large sphere of affairs.

There was one further limitation on the power of the Legislatures. Certain kinds of legislation, including those which would discriminate against British commercial interests, were declared ultra vires by specific sections of the Government of India Act, 1935. The British commercial community secured no special privileges, but it was at least laid down that they could not be treated more unfavourably than their Indian rivals. On several occasions this section proved of considerable value to British interests.

Under the new Act the Federal Government, including the Indian states as well as the provinces, was to be characterised by the retention in it of a measure of dyarchy and by subordination to the British Parliament. Whereas the affairs in which Provincial Governors were to act in their discretion—that is, without the obligation to consult their ministers—were mainly such procedural matters as appointing ministers or summoning the Legislature, the discretion of the Governor-General was to cover a much wider field. In particular, defence and external affairs were wholly reserved to him. The Central Legislature might discuss them, but had no power to grant or withhold supplies in connection with them. In addition to the special responsibilities of the Governors, the Governor-General also had a special responsibility for ‘safeguarding the financial stability and credit of the Federal Government’. He was able to implement this responsibility by means of his power of ‘authenticating’ a demand and by his general right of enacting any measure necessary for the discharge of his functions in his discretion or individual judgment.

If the federal part of the Act had come into force there can be little doubt that at the centre, as in the provinces, the reserved powers would have gradually assumed less importance; it would, in fact, have been the path to Dominion status. Unfortunately, this was never put to the test. The Federal part of the Act was only to come into operation when, to put it in a rough and ready way, half of the Indian princes were prepared to accede—for it must be remembered that accession to the Federation on their part was to be voluntary. There were three main reasons for this proviso. In the first place, it was considered essential as a means of maintaining the unity of India, which was then a cardinal article of faith with His Majesty’s Government. As long as the Governor-General was the effective head of the Government of British India and at the same time the representative of the Crown in the Indian states, the two halves of India were firmly linked together in matters of major policy. If, however, British India moved towards responsible government, the position of the Governor-General would begin to approximate to that of a constitutional Governor-General; he would in due course cease to control the policies of British India and could no longer provide the nexus between British India and the states. A federation of British India alone was therefore considered undesirable.

A second argument leading to the same conclusion was that the presence of the princes in the Central Legislature would provide an element of stability, and this seemed particularly necessary in view of what His Majesty’s Government must have regarded as the irresponsibility of the Congress Party in the years just preceding the Act. There was also the consideration that the minorities, as well as British interests, were apprehensive of a Hindu Congress majority at the centre. The princes’ representatives in the legislature would, it was thought, help to balance the strength of the Congress Party. Accession of half the princely states was therefore to be a condition precedent to responsible government at the centre. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for federation displayed by the princes at the first Round Table Conference faded away and by 1935 they had begun to be extremely nervous about the loss of part of their sovereignty.

That nervousness was heightened from 1937 onwards when the Congress Party began to turn its attention to the affairs of the states. Up till that year it had regarded the states as outside its normal field of operation, but the possible proximity of federation induced a change of Congress policy. The presence, side by side in the Central Legislature, of democratic elected representatives from the provinces and states representatives nominated by autocratic rulers, was felt to be anomalous. It would also have weakened the power of the Congress Party in the Legislature. That party therefore abandoned the policy of non-intervention in the states and gradually lent their weight to agitation against the princes. Successes in Mysore encouraged them still further, and by the middle of 1939 Congress had been so successful in creating disorder in certain states that communal violence broke out and Gandhi was obliged to call off his civil-disobedience movement. All these happenings made the princes still more hesitant about joining a federation in which the Congress Party would be so important. While they were still hesitating the war came and the opportunity of federation on the very favourable terms of the 1935 Act was lost to the princes for ever.

In the light of after events it seems that it was perhaps a mistake to make the application of the federal part of the Act depend on the accession of the princes. If a federation of British India had been established as a start, the princes would almost certainly have had to join before long. At the time, however, the argument in favour of the procedure followed seemed cogent and any other course would have been condemned by important elements in the population. What seems more clear is that the Congress leaders were unwise to embark on a states campaign just at this critical period. If they had exercised patience, the acceding states would have inevitably been influenced by their closer contacts with the representatives of the provinces, and democratic ideas would perhaps before long have permeated all the states. There was nothing intrinsically wrong about the Congress campaign, but it was unwisely timed.

In spite of the liberal character of the 1935 Act, and the fact that if worked properly it would have led rapidly to Dominion status, it satisfied none of the Indian parties. The Liberals, indeed, were prepared to work it though they resented its limitations; but when the elections for the Central Legislature took place in 1936 the Liberals practically disappeared. They included some of the best and most objective brains in India, but they had no real influence with the public. The Congress Party condemned the Act in toto. They were genuinely suspicious of the Reserved Powers and the safeguards; they intensely disliked the federal scheme which allowed the Indian princes to nominate representatives to the Central Legislature; they resented the exclusion of Defence and External Affairs from India parliamentary control; and they had by now hypnotised themselves into the belief that nothing good could come as a gift from Britain. The ‘Constituent Assembly based on adult suffrage’ had become their shibboleth and they could not envisage a satisfactory constitution emanating from any other source. Moreover, then as always, Hindu politicians were essentially legalistic in approach. They wanted everything defined with meticulous accuracy and had no faith in the British method of advance by convention. The same psychological trait was exhibited in 1948 when the Congress leaders insisted on writing all their cherished political principles into the new Constitution and thereby tied themselves hand and foot, as they were to discover sorrowfully a year or two later. Having attacked the new Act bitterly in the Assembly, the Congress nevertheless decided to participate in the 1937 Provincial elections and postponed for a while any decision on the question as to whether they should accept office or not.

The official Muslim spokesmen were almost as bitter as the Congress in their denunciation of certain parts of the Act. It is true that they approved of Provincial autonomy and decided to work it. They seemed, however, to move away temporarily from their earlier demands for a weak centre, and they complained of the limitation of the powers of the proposed Federal Government. Moreover, they considered that the princes were far too well treated in the federal scheme. Indeed in the short interval between the passing of the Act and the Provincial elections in January and February 1937 it might almost have seemed as if, in spite of the terrible bloodshed of the preceding years, a new phase of Hindu-Muslim co-operation were about to begin. Nor did the Provincial elections disturb this apparent harmony. There was much in common between the policies professed by the Congress and the Muslim League during the election campaign. Both parties damned the 1935 Act and both put forward programmes of social and economic reform, though that of the Congress was tinged with the Socialism with which Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru had managed to indoctrinate the party. The Congress only contested fifty-eight of the Muslim constituencies, and while the Congress came back in great strength in the general constituencies, over four hundred of the Muslim seats were secured by non-Congress Muslims.

The Congress now found itself with an overall majority in five provinces and was the strongest single party in two others. It had, therefore, to face the question as to whether it would accept office or not. Opinion on this point was keenly divided. Pandit Nehru and certain other leaders considered that their general rejection of the 1935 Act positively obliged them to refuse office. In the provinces, however, Congressmen showed a strong desire to form a ministry. Apart from the reasonable human desire for power, they were no doubt influenced by the consideration that in the circumstances of Indian politics to be out of office means to lose the limelight. Pandit Nehru nevertheless urged that the Constitution was so full of safeguards and restrictions that to take office would mean the acceptance of responsibility without power. As a compromise between these two lines of thought, in March 1937 the All-India Congress Committee agreed that office might be accepted in any province only if the Governor gave an undertaking not to use his special powers. It was, of course, quite impossible for a Governor to give such an undertaking, and non-Congress ministries, not commanding a majority in the Legislature, thus had to be installed in most provinces. As the weeks went by, Congressmen in the provinces showed an ever-increasing anxiety to take office and obviously wanted a face-saving formula. Lord Linlithgow wisely met this need in June 1937 by a statement so carefully worded that it contained no assurance of any kind and yet made it possible for the Congress leaders to tell their followers that Governors now had no intention of hamstringing their cabinets. Congress ministries were then formed in the Congress majority provinces.

Chapter XXXV

Towards Partition

When the Congress Party decided to accept office, in those provinces where it had a majority the Working Committee of the Party expressly stated that the object of office acceptance was to combat the Act. There were purists like Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru who intended this to be taken literally, but they were in a minority. To those who were in touch with influential Congressmen in the provinces it was abundantly clear that they longed deeply for office provided they could exercise power honourably and effectively, but that their minds were torn by alternating hopes and fears. They were genuinely suspicious of the honesty of British intentions and half-believed that the ‘special responsibilities’ and ‘safeguards’ would be so used as to keep all real power in the hands of British Governors. Allied with this suspicion was the fear that the British element in the Indian Civil Service would be uniformly obstructive. On the other hand, they were influenced by a natural longing for power after long years of frustration and often humiliation, as well as by the desire to serve their country and give effect to their most cherished schemes of reform. Many of them were by nature visionaries with little practical experience of affairs to moderate their idealism. They oversimplified the problems of India and felt that, once power was in Indian hands, poverty, ignorance and disease could be vanquished. If, therefore, the British offer of power did happen to be genuine, how could they reject the opportunity?

They took office, then, with mixed feelings. In the words of the official historian of the Congress Party, they did not ‘go to the Secretariat as if they were going to dwell in their own homes after a long exile. They were rather like the daughter-in-law of the Hindu home that goes to the father-in-law’s house where she has to serve a period of apprenticeship in which she has to deal not merely with her spouse, but his parents and his sisters and brothers as well’. They had to deal with the Governors and with the I.C.S., of whom they were suspicious and sometimes afraid. They had also to adjust themselves to the inevitable rules and regulations of a government machine. ‘In effect then,’ says Pattabhi Sitaramayya, ‘though the Ministerial train was formed anew, it was only the engines that were newly manufactured. The bogeys were all old and even rickety and ramshackle, while the brakes were more actively at work than the engines desired. In addition the coal was old, the stokers and oilmen were apathetic and altogether the new train began to creak ever so much,—on account of grit in the machinery. But that was not all. The engines themselves could not straightway develop full speed (mark the warning given to buyers of new motors) and the passengers in the bogeys began to be clamorous for they expected to travel in air conditioned coaches, with high speed, smooth buffers and elastic springs, but they found the engines hunting like the XB engines at Bihta, the springs bumping, the line itself uneven, and the staff over-meticulous in their rules almost to the point of sabotaging progress.’

Soon, however, they found that they had in fact secured the substance of power; that Governors were friendly; and that the Indian Civil Service as a rule were true to the Civil Service tradition of loyalty to the existing Government, whatever its character or colour might be. As they began to realise their power all thought of combating the Act began to be lost in the golden dream of a regenerated India. To quote the official Congress historian again: ‘To combat the Act and end it might, therefore, be given a wider and deeper meaning than is merely compatible with or applicable to a physical plane.’ They began, in fact, to be far too busy with the problems of government to bother much about the reasons for their being in office. They maintained law and order well; they conformed to the normal principles of government finance; they learned how to utilise the knowledge and industry of the civil services; they went ahead with their plans for reform. As was to be expected, they legislated too much and too hastily, but they were not revolutionary and they desired stability as earnestly as their official predecessors.

In 1937 the Congress leaders had the ball at their feet. There were, it is true, the three provinces of Bengal, the Punjab and Sindh, in which they could not hope for authority, and Assam was to remain precariously balanced between the Congress and the Muslim League. In India as a whole, however, the Congress was by far the most important political factor. Although the Muslims were uneasy at the growing strength of the Congress, they had not yet seriously thought of rejecting the federal principle or of demanding Pakistan. All the Congress Party leaders had to do in order to establish their power was to be a little conciliatory in their dealings with the Muslims. Whether such an attempt would be made or not, depended in the first place on the way in which the Congress Party organised itself to deal with the situation created by Provincial autonomy.

In a country as vast and diversified as India, one of the most difficult problems confronting any political organisation is that of finding the correct balance between the Central and Provincial parts of the mechanism. Since the Congress demand for self-government was based on the fact of Indian nationality, it was inherently probable that the All-India aspect of the organisation would predominate and that the centre would exercise a fair measure of control over the provinces. At one time, the rivalry between the Bombay and Bengal leaders might have weakened this tendency, but at a later stage the unique position of Mr. Gandhi established beyond doubt the paramount authority of the centre. Although at the zenith of his power he was not an office bearer of the party, he was rightly described by Pandit Nehru as the ‘permanent super President’, and the Working Committee of the party were cloaked with the mantle of his authority.

In theory the ultimate authority of the party was vested in the All-India Congress Committee, elected yearly by the Provincial Congress Committees. In practice that body met only once or twice a year, and the policy and tactics of the party were controlled by the Working Committee of fifteen which grew rapidly in authority during the non-co-operation and Civil Disobedience movements. In 1934 a still further step towards centralisation was taken when it was decided that henceforth the Working Committee should no longer be elected but should be chosen by the President. This was an altogether new interpretation of democratic principles. All Congress members, acting through the party hierarchy, would elect a President and then make him virtually dictator for the time of his office.

When Provincial autonomy was introduced in 1937 the Congress High Command set itself to exercise still tighter control over Provincial Committees. For this there seemed to be two reasons. In the first place, Provincial leaders had displayed a keen desire to take office and might in a sense be regarded as the ‘weaker brethren’ not so certain to persevere in the true faith of combating the 1935 Act. Secondly Provincial autonomy might well mean Provincial separatism and a destruction of that unity of India which was fundamental to the Congress creed. The principal instrument of the stricter control now instituted was the Parliamentary Board, formed in an emergency in 1934 to co-ordinate Provincial parliamentary activities. It now assumed much greater importance and began to exercise close supervision over the Congress Provincial parliamentary parties. It was this body which scrutinised the conditions under which each Provincial party accepted office, which approved or modified all legislative proposals, and which at a later stage directed reluctant ministries to resign. From this time onwards Congress Provincial ministers seemed to forget their responsibilities to their Provincial electorates and to hold themselves accountable to this powerful central authority. Provincial autonomy thus became distorted and the system of responsible government lost much of its virtue. This attitude of the Congress High Command protected the unity of the party and perhaps of India, but it prevented the healthy development of parliamentary parties in the provinces.

More important than this was the fact that the concentration of power at the centre bred an authoritarian approach to Indian politics. In the provinces the necessary give and take of parliamentary life might have developed tolerance and respect for the views of others, but these qualities were not likely to grow in the rarefied atmosphere of a Central Congress Cabinet with no responsibility for the government of the country. The Congress High Command began to regard themselves as the only guardians of the true faith and Congressmen as the only patriots. From that it was a short step to the belief that only the Congress could claim to represent Indian opinion and feelings. Minorities were entitled to protection, but must seek it within the Congress fold. Spiritual arrogance grew apace and conditioned the approach of the predominantly Hindu Congress to the Muslims at the one time above all when conciliation was required. It had been assumed throughout the discussions leading up to the 1935 Act that representatives of minority communities would be included in the Provincial Governments, and, indeed, Governors had been directed to ensure this as far as possible. Such a result was to some extent achieved in the non-Congress provinces, but the Congress High Command refused to sanction Congress-League coalitions and in the Hindu majority provinces ministries consisting only of Congressmen were formed. In the United Provinces, for example, Muslim representatives were invited to join the ministry, but only on condition that they became members of the Congress Party and that the Muslim League ceased to exist. In other provinces, similar conditions were imposed, and with one exception members of the Muslim League were rigorously excluded from office.

The Congress Party was fully within its rights in adopting this exclusive policy and may even have felt that it was following normal parliamentary practice. There can be little doubt, however, that it made a grave tactical blunder. There was no difference in social or economic policy serious enough to make Congress-League coalitions unnatural or unworkable, and the Muslims therefore felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were excluded from office merely because the Congress was essentially a Hindu body. This aroused resentment among the Muslims and so strengthened the authority of the Muslim League. Moreover, it increased the danger that political divisions in India would be drawn permanently on communal lines.

At the same time, the Congress embarked on a widespread campaign to convert Muslim villagers throughout India to the Congress creed. The timing of this campaign just after the refusal to form coalition ministries was not fortunate. It at once called forth a fanatical counter-propaganda, and perhaps its most important effect was to alarm the Muslims and to facilitate the task of the Muslim League propagandists. They were soon able to raise the never-failing cry of ‘Islam in danger’.

As the temper of the Muslims rose, the authority of Mr. Jinnah grew with it. In October 1937 he spoke bluntly of Hindu exclusiveness and stated, perhaps for the first time, that ‘Moslems can expect neither justice nor fair play under a Congress Government’. Up to that time the strength of the Muslim League had lain almost solely in the provinces where the Muslims were in a minority, and it had not counted for much elsewhere. Now, however, the Muslims were thoroughly alarmed throughout India, and in the Punjab, Bengal and Assam they declared their support of the League, whatever their provincial political groupings might be.

In every predominantly Hindu province the Muslims began to complain of unfair treatment. They alleged that they did not get due promotion in government service; that they were deprived of minor local and municipal offices wherever possible; and that in every way they suffered administrative discrimination. It is not necessary for our purpose to examine the justice of these complaints, and, indeed, the writer must in fairness record his own personal knowledge of many apparently justifiable counter-complaints by Hindus in Muslim-ruled provinces. The important fact is that, whereas the Hindus, with their great All-India majority, had a sense of security, from 1937 onwards Muslims were profoundly apprehensive of the future. The Congress had used its strength unwisely and had converted the Muslim League from a relatively unimportant body to a mighty power. The League bitterly arraigned the Congress ministers, and Mr. Jinnah went so far as to demand the appointment of a Royal Commission to enquire into the alleged oppression of Muslims. Militancy grew apace and both parties developed private armies. The Congress Party had for some time its own semi-trained volunteers, and now the Muslim League recruited and put into uniform Muslim national guards and kindred bodies.

This bitterness had its inevitable reaction on Muslim constitutional thought. Up to now the Muslims had been prepared to depend for their protection on ‘weightage’ or ‘safeguards’. By 1939 they were convinced that, whatever safeguards might be designed, an Indian federation in which the centre retained substantial power would in fact mean Hindu domination. The more moderate Muslims talked of being prepared to accept a federation in which all important powers were vested in the provinces, but others began to doubt the desirability of any All-India federation at all. Already the idea of Pakistan was beginning to take shape, though vaguely and hesitantly.

The name Pakistan seems to have been invented in 1933 by four pamphleteers of whom Rahmat Ali was the best known. In their pamphlet they claimed that the Muslims of India were a separate race from the Hindus and they demanded a separate national status for the Muslim provinces of the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province (Afghanistan), Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan. The initial letters of these states were formed into the word Pakistan, and it was then fortunately discovered that in Arabic this would mean the ‘land of the pure’.

Except for a few cranks nobody in India took the Pakistan idea seriously until after the inauguration of Provincial autonomy, and it is undoubtedly true that the real creators of the demand for Pakistan were the Congress High Command. If they had been prepared to abate their claims to be the sole spokesmen for India and had tried to allay Muslim fears even slightly, Pakistan might never have come to birth. Unfortunately, the more moderate Muslim proposals for a federation in which the balance of power would be in the provinces rather than in the centre received no serious consideration from the Congress. In the absence of a spirit of co-operation on either side, Muslims gradually swung round en masse to the demand for a separate Muslim state.

In 1938, at the Patna meeting of the All-India Muslim League, the 1935 Act was roundly condemned and direct action against it was suggested. Similar sentiments were expressed at frequent intervals in the next twelve months. In the meantime various schemes intended to give the maximum possible autonomy to predominantly Muslim areas were put forward, the most important of them being the plan of Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, Premier of the Punjab, for a loose federation of zones. Events had, however, moved too fast for any such compromise to be acceptable, and in February 1940 Mr. Jinnah lent his great authority to the demand for the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. It was the writer’s good fortune to dine with Mr. Jinnah a day or two before the official adoption of this scheme by the Muslim League, and the conversation inevitably turned to Pakistan. Mr. Jinnah declared that at the stage of imperial rule where self-government was not in sight the British were the finest administrators known to history, but that when politics and national feeling had begun to count they completely failed to understand the mentality of subject races. ‘You talk,’ he said, ‘of the unity of India, but you ought to know that it is a chimera, existing nowhere except in your own minds and in the external unity which you wisely forced on the country. You go on to talk of parliamentary democracy and you fail to realise that the assumptions on which it depends have no application at all to Indian conditions.’ He went on to develop, cogently and impressively, his two-nation theory and to expound the full Pakistan demand, which was to be adopted by the Muslim League formally in March 1940. The writer and others present raised all the obvious objections—economic dangers, frontier problems, military and administrative difficulties. Mr. Jinnah brushed them all aside and completely refused to discuss details. This capacity for adhering to a clearcut idea and ignoring all difficulties of detail and procedure was perhaps Mr. Jinnah’s greatest source of strength. From this time onwards, he who had for long been the apostle of the unity of India set his face steadfastly towards partition and would not be deflected either by blandishments or by threats.

Shortly after this time, the writer asked a well-known Muslim, now holding high office in Pakistan, why he gave such support to Mr. Jinnah in spite of disagreeing with him on many points. The answer was: ‘Because he is the one man amongst us who will never give in or compromise with the Congress.’ He was, in fact, morally and intellectually incorruptible and his leadership of the Muslim League at this period made it certain that the claim to Pakistan would not be abated.

Chapter XXXVI

The Second World War

India was thus in an unhappy state when war broke out. Communal feeling ran high. The Muslims had definitely rejected any scheme of federation, and the Congress had refused to consider the demand for partition. In 1939 the crucial question for both parties was as to what should be their attitude towards the war.

For some years the most prominent of the Congress leaders had taken an anti-militarist line. Some had come genuinely under the influence of Mr. Gandhi’s pacificism, while others were concerned only with putting difficulties in the way of ‘British Imperialism’. All of them attacked the policy of heavy Indian Defence expenditure, and in the Faizpur Congress of December 1936 they resolved ‘to resist exploitation of India and her people, her manpower and her resources for the purposes of British imperialism in the event of a world war breaking out . . . no credits must be voted for such a war and voluntary subscriptions and war loans must not be supported and all other war preparations resisted’. Somewhat unreasonably, at the time of passing this resolution they castigated Britain for not springing to the defence of Abyssinia. As the international situation grew worse, however, the unreality of denouncing excessive military expenditure became manifest and the more practical-minded amongst the Congress leaders began to concentrate their criticisms on the slowness of Indianisation of the Army and on the exclusion of the Defence Budget from the vote of the Assembly.

In the months just before the war Indian troops were sent to Aden and Singapore as part of the general defence preparations. In protest against this action the Congress Working Committee directed Congressmen to abstain from attending the autumn session of the Central Legislature. The sympathies of most Indians, whether Hindus or Muslims, were nevertheless with Britain in her anti-fascist struggle, and in the first few days of war many Hindu leaders and journalists seemed to think that political controversy would be suspended for the time. At this juncture Mr. Gandhi rose above the rest of his colleagues in moral stature and vision and offered his own personal unconditional moral support to the Viceroy. His own report of his interview with the Viceroy as reported by the official Congress historian is moving. ‘I told His Excellency that my own sympathies were with England and France from the purely humanitarian standpoint. I told him that I could not contemplate without being disturbed to the very depth the destruction of London which had hitherto been regarded as impregnable. And as I was picturing before him the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster Abbey and their possible destruction, I broke down.’

There were other Indians, too, who, like Mr. Gandhi, saw clearly that India’s chance of freedom depended on the victory of the Allies. The Liberals unhesitatingly offered support to the British war effort, and even the Hindu Mahasabha, though attaching conditions to its help, declared that India must co-operate with Britain in the war. Still more emphatic was the support given to Mr. Gandhi’s view by that remarkable man, Satyamurti from Madras. Satyamurti was perhaps the most practical and certainly the most industrious of all the Congress leaders in the Central Legislative Assembly. He read every white paper and blue book that appeared and he was generally regarded as the ‘War Minister designate’ under the hoped-for federal government. Early in September 1939 he made a very forceful statement: ‘I consider if by some misfortune we are forced to continue under the control of some alien power for some time yet it is better to be under the rule of Great Britain than Germany, for the English, in spite of certain drawbacks and the many injustices done to us, are the only people who have a regard for principles and regard for public opinion and have some good sense and political honesty left; unlike Hitler who is the professed enemy of all the black races of the world. If Hitler had been here he would have shot Mahatma Gandhi and all of us by this time. The Hitler régime would be a thousand times worse than the British. What we want is “swaraj” and it is no use leaving the door open to another alien power to overrun the country.’ In spite of this support, Mr. Gandhi nevertheless for once failed to convert the Working Committee to his views and for the next two years he found himself increasingly at loggerheads with his Congress colleagues. Although as a pacifist he would take no part in war activities, he considered that the Congress should give moral support to Britain in the war, without any conditions whatsoever. The Working Committee, on the other hand, inspired by Pandit Nehru, were out to bargain for an early if not an immediate transfer of power. In the frank words of the official Congress historian: ‘Two issues emerged: (i) if we got what we wanted, what help would we give? (ii) if we did not get what we wanted, what action (fight) would we take?’

At this stage Lord Linlithgow interviewed leading Indians in the hope of securing their co-operation. Morally right though this was, it was perhaps a tactical mistake, for it gave the Congress leaders an exaggerated idea of their own bargaining strength.

The opportunist attitude of the Congress was in part concealed by the high moral tone adopted by them throughout the discussions. They complained bitterly that India had not been consulted prior to her entry in the war. Formal consultation would, it is clear, have not been appropriate under the existing constitution, since the supreme authority in Indian affairs was still vested in the British Parliament. It has often been contended, however, that, in spite of this difficulty, informal consultations, perhaps by means of an Assembly resolution, could have been arranged. As it happens, an admirable opportunity for expression of the public view was provided by the Defence of India Bill which was introduced in the Central Assembly two days after the outbreak of war, but the Congress Party declined to attend the session of the Assembly at all and so shirked the responsibility of either agreeing or refusing to support the Allies. They next demanded that Britain should declare her war aims. This meant in effect that Britain should include amongst them the immediate independence of India, in spite of the communal deadlock.

At the same time the Muslim League declared that its support of His Majesty’s Government must be conditional on the assurance that nothing should be done in the matter of further constitutional advance for India without the full consent and approval of the All-India Muslim League. In reality any important constitutional change at this time would have been quite impracticable. It would have involved either acceptance or rejection of the Muslim demand for partition, and in either case the country would have been plunged into chaos at a most critical moment. The Viceroy went as far as possible in his declaration of 17th October 1939 when he reaffirmed Dominion status as the accepted goal and declared that it was His Majesty’s Government’s intention to reopen the constitutional issue at the end of the war—a statement repeated more formally in January 1940 and again later in that year.

It is not necessary to follow this depressing story in further detail. In October 1939, having failed in their attempts at bargaining, the Congress Working Committee directed Congress Provincial Ministries to resign. The decision was uncongenial to many Congressmen in the provinces, but Pandit Nehru and the Working Committee had their own way. When the Battle of Britain was beginning many Hindus were deeply moved and fresh attempts at a rapprochement were made. Even at this late stage Mr. Gandhi would have been ready to co-operate, but Pandit Nehru, who had never approved of office acceptance, was obdurate and the Congress continued throughout the war to abstain from giving any kind of help or accepting any responsibility for the conduct of government.

The attitude of the Muslim League was very different from that of the Congress. They would not offer official co-operation in the absence of the assurances demanded earlier, but League Provincial Ministries played a great part in the war effort, and the Muslim League leaders did much to encourage recruitment to the armed forces. The Muslim League policy might indeed be described as theoretical neutrality combined with practical co-operation in the war.

In 1940 and 1941 there were thus five main currents of thought amongst politically minded Indians. Most important of them was that of Mr. Gandhi, whose attitude had two phases. In the first phase, he felt that Britain was entitled to moral support; at a later stage, his pacificism became more pronounced and he feared lest any bargain between the Congress and the British Government might lead to active Congress participation in the war. Secondly, there was the extremist school, headed by Pandit Nehru, which was determined to compel outright surrender to India by Britain and reserved the right to consider its attitude to the war thereafter. Thirdly, there were those in the Congress Party, who, with Rajagopalachari as their head, were prepared at any time to negotiate a settlement and help in winning the war. Next came the co-operators, including particularly the Liberals, and perhaps more important the Hindu Mahasabha, who regarded the war as an admirable opportunity for vast numbers of Hindus to enjoy military training and thus become prepared to fight the Muslims after the war. Lastly, there was the Muslim League, whose attitude has been described. It is no wonder that the mind of the ordinary Indian was confused.

Congress non-co-operation did not make much difference to India’s contribution to the war. Recruits for the fighting services were forthcoming in adequate numbers, and the pace of development of the Army was limited by lack of equipment rather than by unavailability of manpower. Recruitment of officers in the Indian Air Force and certain special branches of the Army was at one time difficult, but it is doubtful if this was to any serious extent the result of the political situation. In the field of production, industrialists did as much as India’s practical resources permitted, while labour recruitment was stimulated by higher wages. It is, of course, true that these results could not have been obtained if India had been solidly against the war; but, as we have seen, even in Congress circles there were many who doubted the wisdom of their leaders. The position, however, became unsatisfactory after the entry of Japan into the war, particularly after the catastrophe of Malaya. Those, who, like the writer, were concerned at this time with observing and trying to strengthen public morale, feared that in the event of a Japanese invasion the civilian Hindu population would do little to resist the invader or even to help the Indian military authorities. As Sir Reginald Coupland has well expressed it: ‘Educated Indians as a whole were not pro-Japanese; the imminence of the threat to India did not make them any more pro-British . . . Japan it was argued would not have attacked India if she had not been part of the British Empire. If India had been free to choose she might, like Eire, have been neutral.’ The fear of Japan outweighed the predilections of the intelligentsia in favour of China and Russia.

At this time of extreme danger, the British Government decided to make one more attempt to convince India of the sincerity of Britain’s intentions and to appeal for Indian help. In March 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps, who was known to be well-disposed towards the Congress, flew to India with new British proposals comprising a long-term and a short-term plan. The long-term plan contained two main points and two conditions. In the first place, the British Government undertook that immediately after the cessation of hostilities it would set up a Constituent Assembly—elected by the lower houses of the Provincial Legislatures, unless the main parties agreed on some other basis, but also containing representatives of the states. Secondly, Britain would accept the constitution drafted by that body subject only to two qualifications. The first condition was that any province not satisfied with the new constitution might secede from the new Union; the other requirement was the negotiation of a treaty between His Majesty’s Government and the Constituent Assembly regarding the rights of minorities. It was made clear in the statement, and still more so in press conferences, that the Indian Union would have the right to leave the Commonwealth if it so wished. The minorities to be covered by the treaty would not include the British. United Kingdom commercial interests would, in fact, secure no special protection in the constitution, and if they were to be covered by any treaty that would only arise after India had attained constitutional self-government. There was thus no question of self-government being conditional on arrangements for the protection of the British commercial community.

The draft declaration that Sir Stafford took with him was indeed a full-blooded offer of complete self-government at the end of the war. The Congress objected to it: firstly, because it declared the right of provinces to secede from the Indian Union; and, secondly, because the states representatives to the Constituent Assembly would be nominated by the rulers. The Muslims, on the other hand, were obviously satisfied with the declaration, since it contained possibilities of partition, and all outside observers in Delhi were agreed that if Congress accepted the plan the League would do likewise. When the Congress rejected the long-term plan, the leaders of the League considered it tactically wise to join in the rejection so that they could stake a claim for a less qualified acceptance of partition in principle.

The short-term plan has not much bearing on the subject of this book and it need only be said that it proposed that each of the main parties should have representatives in the Central Cabinet, which would be entirely Indian except for the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief. Even the responsibilities of the Commander-in-Chief would be shared with an Indian Defence Minister, though the British Government would retain ultimate control of defence during the war. If this offer had been accepted, power would in fact have been transferred except in the sphere of defence. Once again the Congress insisted upon taking a legalistic view and demanded a revision of the Constitution. It was generally believed by neutral observers, who, like the writer, were in Delhi at the time, that the Congress Party were not as worried about the short-term plan as they professed to be. It was, in fact, easier to reject the short-term aspect of the proposal than to concentrate unduly on the long-term plan and so dangerously antagonise the Muslims. In the end Congress rejected the whole scheme, and thus the most striking offer of abdication ever made by a ruling power was refused.

These events illustrate vividly the difficulty of negotiation from weakness. Many Indians believed that the Japanese would win, at least in the Eastern theatre of war, and were not therefore as attracted by the promise of self-government as they would have been some years earlier. Indeed Mr. Gandhi, who had moved far from the position taken up by him in 1939, described the offer as ‘a post-dated cheque on a failing bank’.

The breakdown of the Cripps negotiations greatly strengthened Mr. Gandhi’s position and he was now again almost the dictator of the Congress. Nevertheless, his own mind was still far from clear as to what should be done, and it is almost impossible for a non-mystical Westerner to follow Mr. Gandhi’s thoughts during the next few months. In April, in the most desperate phase of the Eastern war, he demanded the immediate withdrawal of Allied troops and suggested that such action might result in a change in the mentality of the Axis powers. A little later he wrote in his paper The Harijan that ‘if the British left India to her fate, probably the Japanese would leave India alone’. Pandit Nehru was perturbed at this development, and when the Working Committee met at Wardha in July 1942 it took a rather different line. British troops, it declared, must be withdrawn from India, but as the Congress had ‘no desire whatsoever to embarrass Great Britain or the Allied Powers in their prosecution of the war’, and as moreover the Congress was ‘anxious to avoid the experience of Malaya, Singapore and Burma’, it ‘agreed to the stationing of the armed forces of the Allies in India’. In fact, the Congress, like most human beings, wanted to have it both ways. This approach may have been sincere, but it was unreal, and was felt to be so by many of the rank and file of the party. Mr. Gandhi spoke of leaving India to God or to anarchy, but the Congress Working Committee bluntly threatened Civil Disobedience under Mr. Gandhi’s leadership. At this stage the Viceroy exercised incredible patience—more, indeed, than the writer then considered wise—and Congress leaders were allowed to go ahead with preparations for the All-India Congress Committee meeting at Bombay on 7th August 1942, when, in effect, a rebellion was launched under Mr. Gandhi’s supreme command.

Unlike previous Civil Disobedience movements, rebellion was to be quick and decisive—everything was to be won or lost in a few weeks. It led at once to violence and brutality on an unprecedented scale. Railway lines were torn up; police stations were destroyed; civil servants were cruelly murdered; and every possible attempt was made to paralyse the administration. The Congress leaders disclaimed responsibility for the outrages and insisted that they had intended a non-violent movement, and that the violence was a spontaneous manifesto of the people’s anger. Mr. Gandhi himself went so far as to say: ‘I do not want rioting as a direct result. If, in spite of precautions, rioting does take place, it cannot be helped.’ With his previous experience of Civil Disobedience, Mr. Gandhi must have known that violence would in fact result, though perhaps not even he could have anticipated its scale. Whatever their intentions may have been—and it is probable that different members of the Working Committee were actuated by different motives—the Congress leaders had released forces beyond their control. As for the spontaneity of the outbreak, it is not easy to reconcile this claim with the remarkable uniformity of method in the widespread outrages.

The Viceroy, with the concurrence of his Indian ministers (except three who subsequently resigned) acted firmly. Numerous arrests were made, and the ease and rapidity with which the movement was suppressed suggests that it cannot have had the backing of the people as a whole. There is, indeed, good ground for belief that in all these transactions the attitude of the Congress High Command did not entirely commend itself to many of its more thoughtful followers.

We need not here concern ourselves with the period of the detention of the Congress leaders; with Mr. Gandhi’s notorious fast; or with the gradual relaxation of the restrictive orders when the war came to an end. It was, indeed, in conformity with Britain’s repeatedly declared intention that in 1946 a Cabinet Mission came to India to make another attempt at settling the differences between Hindus and Muslims and offering self-government.

However significant a place the Cabinet Mission will find in a general history of India, it is not of first-class importance in assessing the impact of Britain on India. It left little lasting effect, mainly because it shirked the fundamental issue of partition. It rejected the full Pakistan claim of the Muslim League on the grounds that such a Pakistan would include substantial non-Muslim minorities; and it equally rejected the proposal for a truncated Pakistan, similar to that which was eventually created, on the grounds of impracticability. The unwillingness of the Mission to recommend partition was understandable and indeed honourable, for partition meant the destruction of that unity which had perhaps been Britain’s greatest contribution to India. In a sense, to advise partition would have been to admit Britain’s failure, and His Majesty’s Government was therefore most reluctant to take any step in that direction. The Mission therefore put forward an extremely complicated three-tiered proposal, in which there would be a federal centre for an undivided India; a second tier consisting of provinces which chose to group themselves together for certain subjects; and a third tier which would consist of the provinces themselves. The proposal was entirely academic and never had the slightest chance of acceptance either by Congress or by the Muslim League.

The patience and the sincerity of the Mission won universal admiration, but the lifelong tendency of its most dynamic member—Sir Stafford Cripps—to over-rationalise problems and to underestimate emotional forces, foredoomed it to failure. Because Pakistan was logically indefensible, Sir Stafford could not believe that the Muslim demand for it was irresistible. Nor could he perhaps fully appreciate the extent to which, in the case of the extremist sections of the Hindus, nationalism was a cloak for a determination to achieve Hindu domination. Sir Stafford Cripps perhaps had a greater intellectual comprehension of the Indian problem than any of his contemporaries, but the problem itself was emotional and not intellectual. The Mission nevertheless achieved two practical results. In the first place, it established the Constituent Assemblies which were ultimately to frame the Constitution of India. Even here it made certain grievous mistakes, as, for example, when it so constituted them as to leave the British element in a commanding position in the Bengal Constituent Assembly. This meant, in practice, that the British votes would determine Bengal’s choice in the matter of grouping with other provinces—or, in other words, Bengal’s accession to Hindu or Muslim India. Mr. Gandhi at once pounced on this situation and only the wisdom and restraint of the British representatives, who abstained from taking their place in the Constituent Assembly, avoided serious difficulties.

The second achievement of the Mission was that it started proposals which—after much unseemly bargaining, in which His Majesty’s Government and the Viceroy did not figure too well—led to the formation of an interim Central Government containing Muslim League and Congress representatives. This interim government was a very unhappy affair. The stresses and strains within it symbolised the bitterness between Hindus and Muslims outside, and when the Calcutta riots in the second half of 1946 led to unprecedented communal massacres, all authority seemed to be at an end. A few months later the mockery of the pretended cabinet unity was made manifest to the world, when the Congress party strove hard to secure the rejection of the Budget introduced by the Muslim League Finance Minister, Mr. Liaqat Ali Khan. The coalition was unreal and could neither endure nor govern the country. In the meantime, the civil services, already demoralised by having been caretakers for too long, were losing their grip, and administration was at a low ebb. The Cabinet Mission policy of shirking the issue of partition had produced the inevitable chaos.

Chapter XXXVII

The Transfer of Power

After the failure of the Cabinet Mission the communal situation deteriorated rapidly and the prospect of a settlement became infinitely more remote. His Majesty’s Government found themselves in a dilemma. They had declared their desire to hand over power, but, in the absence of any agreement between the parties, to whom were they to transfer it? In theory there were three courses of action open to them. They could continue to rule India indefinitely; they could impose a unitary constitution; or they could partition India; but to each of these courses there were grave practical objections. An indefinite continuance of British rule would have probably led to large-scale rebellion and the stern measures required to suppress it would have won neither sympathy from world opinion nor support from the British public. This policy would, in fact, have been universally regarded as a breach of faith. The second alternative, namely the imposition of an unitary constitution, would have been neither justifiable nor practicable in view of the evident determination of the ninety million Muslims to have partition. That determination had been made abundantly clear in the 1946 elections, when every Muslim seat in the Central Legislative Assembly had been won by pro-partition Muslims. The third choice—of accepting partition—was one which His Majesty’s Government were not yet prepared to follow.

The plan actually adopted by His Majesty’s Government was suggested by the belief that neither of the two main parties had yet got to grips with the real problem, and probably would not do so as long as they were given no time limit. On and February 1947 His Majesty’s Government therefore announced its intention of transferring power to Indian hands by June 1948, whether a constitution had been agreed or not. The machinery for constitution-making was already in being, and it was hoped that this announcement would induce the Muslims to participate in the Constituent Assemblies and inspire those bodies with a sense of urgency and reality. To some extent the plan succeeded; the leaders of the major parties did show a greater desire to get these matters settled, but unfortunately that did not make them any more ready to understand the point of view of the other parties. Each of them felt that in view of the urgent need to frame a constitution there must be a compromise, but each expected the other to do the compromising. It was soon clear that no real progress was being made, and in March 1947 Lord Mountbatten was sent out as Viceroy to make a new approach to the problem. Events now moved fast. His Majesty’s Government soon recognised the inevitability of partition; the Congress indicated to the Viceroy their readiness to accept it under protest rather then defer self-government any longer; and in June 1947 the British Prime Minister, Mr. Attlee, made the statement which in the following month was implemented in the Indian Independence Act. That Act effected three changes. In the first place, it partitioned India and set up two dominions completely independent of each other; secondly, it conferred on each of those Dominions full self-government and completely divested His Majesty’s Government and the United Kingdom of any responsibility for the government of either of them; while in the third place, it surrendered all suzerainty over the Indian states and terminated all treaties between the Crown and those states.

The first of these changes was facilitated by the fact that in between the June announcement and the passing of the Indian Independence Act, the East Bengal members of the Bengal Constituent Assembly had voted in favour of the partition of Bengal and the inclusion of East Bengal in Pakistan; while the West Punjab had also opted for Pakistan. Sindh as a whole had voted for inclusion in Pakistan, and the new Muslim State was thus to consist of an eastern and a western block separated by over a thousand miles from one another. All these options were implemented by the Indian Independence Act, but the position of the North-West Frontier Province and of the district of Sylhet (in Assam) remained to be settled. Provision was made in the Act for a referendum in those areas, and in due course they both joined Pakistan.

The frontiers of India and Pakistan were fixed in the Act on a somewhat rough-and-ready basis, but provision was made for the appointment of a boundary commission to demarcate them exactly. The Commission which sat in due course under the chairmanship of Sir Cyril Radcliffe gave rise to bitter controversy. Some of the Commission’s findings, particularly in the Punjab, were considered by the Muslims to be unfair, and their leaders alleged that Sir Cyril, after initially drawing boundaries more favourable to them, had altered his award under the direction of Lord Mountbatten. There is no ground whatsoever for believing this allegation and at the time the writer, who was in close touch with those concerned, completely satisfied himself as to its untruth. It was, nevertheless, believed implicitly by most politically minded Muslims and for a time coloured the feelings of Pakistanis toward Britain.

The second effect of the Act was to make India and Pakistan completely self-governing. This naturally meant the abrogation of all provisions relating to the ‘discretion’ or individual judgment of the Governor-General or the Governors and so virtually initiated a system of full responsible government. The new Dominions were, of course, left with full freedom to frame their own constitutions as they thought fit. It was also made clear in the June statement that they would be at liberty to remain in or to leave the British Commonwealth at their discretion.

The third result of the Act was to leave the Indian states completely independent, free either to join India or Pakistan or to remain aloof from either Union. The Act in fact created not two but five hundred and sixty-four independent countries, of which two only, namely, India and Pakistan, were to be Dominions. In theory it left India even more fragmented than when Britain first began to assume authority. In practice it was clear that the vast majority of the states would have to accede immediately to either India or Pakistan. The forces of cohesion which Britain had built up, though not strong enough to make the partition of India unnecessary, were fully adequate to ensure that within a short time nearly every princely state would find independence impossible. The stages by which this happened are outside the scope of this book and we need only remark that the unity imposed by Britain for many years was not destroyed.

If the view set forth by the writer as to the inevitability of partition is accepted, the policy contained in the June announcement of the Act can only be criticised on three grounds. The first objection commonly levelled is that it ‘left the princes high and dry’. No Englishman can remain unmoved by this charge, when he remembers that the princes had stood by Britain in two wars and that the premier prince had obtained the proud title of ‘Faithful Ally of the British’. Now the faithful ally was left to take care of himself in spite of many promises. Whatever sentiment may suggest, the course followed by the British Government was probably right. If Britain had supported an independent union of the larger states, she would indeed have been guilty of destroying her own work by the permanent sub-division of India. Once the paramount power had gone, either the states had to become integral parts of the Indian or Pakistan Unions or else the sub-continent must again become a congeries of mutually suspicious and perhaps hostile states. Before the transfer of power, the might with which Britain defended the Indian states was based on and largely financed by British India. The very basis of this power was now gone and it was unthinkable that Britain should maintain an army in princely India to defend the princes against the Indian Union. It may be difficult to defend His Majesty’s Government against the charge of breaking faith with the princes, but it would have been far more difficult to justify any other attitude. The plain fact was that her obligations to the princes belonged to an order which had now come to an end.

The second objection to the scheme of transfer of power is that it made no provision for the protection of the Untouchables or other minorities. Here, too, the criticism is based on a very proper sentiment rather than on reason. Insistence on Britain’s right to fulfil her obligations to minorities would, in fact, have been a derogation from India’s sovereignty—it could only have meant another period of tutelage. If India was fit to govern herself, she must be deemed fit to treat minorities in the proper way.

The third criticism of the scheme is that it was carried out too hastily, in that the period between the announcement in June 1947 and the commencement of independence on 15th August 1947 was all too short to enable a smooth transition to take place. This is a matter about which it is difficult to dogmatise. The risks of haste were obvious, but no less real were the dangers that the newly won agreement on partition might not be maintained and that a bitter reopening of the whole question at a period of great tension and when administration was at its lowest ebb might be disastrous. It is possible to maintain that greater precautions should have been taken in the Punjab from the second half of 1947 onward, but as regards the final transition itself perhaps the balanced view is that speed was of the essence of the contract. If the inevitability of partition had been recognised in 1946 or earlier a somewhat more lengthy process of transition might have been possible, but by 1947 the urgency was great and brooked no delay.

There is no historical parallel for this closing scene in the drama of the British Indian Empire. Other ruling powers have abdicated after defeat in war or as a result of successful insurrection, but it was left for Britain to surrender her authority of set purpose and as part of a process of evolution which had been operating for some decades. She acted under no external compulsion. In 1942, although at the nadir of her military fortunes, she had unmistakably crushed a carefully prepared rebellion in India; and in 1945 she and her allies had completely defeated their Western and Eastern enemies. The Menace of Russia and China had not yet appeared and Britain and America seemed to sway the destinies of the world. It was at that moment of supreme power that Britain transferred full authority to India and Pakistan and demonstrated, once and for all, her belief that self-government is the only proper end of the colonial system.

Section IV — The Economic Impact

Chapter XXXVIII

The Economic Problem Stated

It is now necessary to consider the economic aspects of the British impact on India, and here we shall find ourselves beset by three major difficulties. The first of them arises from the fact that, while we have to cope with a vast and bewildering mass of documentary evidence regarding the British period, our information as to economic conditions in the days before Plassey is meagre indeed. The many Muslim annalists of the Mughal Empire took little interest in economic matters, and even that monumental work, the Ain-i-Akbari, tells us but little of the standard of living of the ordinary man. Nor can we piece together anything like a complete picture from the writings of the European visitors to pre-British India. We know in an exact quantitative sense how poor the Indian masses are today, but we have no such knowledge of the conditions of their forebears.

The second difficulty arises from the mass of prejudice with which this subject has been surrounded from many years. British officials and statesmen have been led by imperial pride to accept it as an article of faith that Britain has brought to India wealth and prosperity. Indian politicians, on the other hand, have written volumes regarding the wickedness of the system of ‘colonial economy’ and have been wont to assert—in the words of the pledge formerly taken by members of the Congress Party on Independence Day—that ‘the British Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually’. They write of a prosperous and progressive pre-British India and they assert that the ordinary Indian today is poorer than his sixteenth-century predecessor. This poverty, they maintain, is due to foreign rule.

The average Englishman in India not only regards this picture as grotesque but cannot even conceive that any Indian really believes it to be true. On both sides there is an almost complete lack of objectivity. Indian economists point to the appalling poverty and ill health of India; they complain bitterly that commerce and industry are concentrated in relatively few hands; they talk of the vast strain on India’s resources resulting from the large remittances to Britain; they blame Britain for the fact that agricultural yields are lower in India than anywhere else in the world; and, finally, they reproach Britain with having left India unable to feed herself. British writers reply that poverty was far worse in Mughal times; that health measures initiated by the British have been remarkably successful; that all wealth in seventeenth-century India was concentrated in the hands of the mansabdars and the other grandees, while the political system made it impossible for a strong middle class to emerge; and that in spite of the ‘drain’ India today is the eighth most important industrial nation in the world. Most of these conflicting statements are partly true. Our problem in the present section of this book is to get them in due proportion and to divest them of emotional content.

The third difficulty is that in considering the economic impact on India of the British connection we are in reality studying a dual process. The first element in that process was the assumption of political authority in India by a Western power; the second element was the impact, on the primarily agricultural economy of India, of the industrial revolution in Europe. The establishment of British rule in India coincided with an aggressive phase of Western capitalist and industrialist development. Britain thus acted as the catalytic agent, by which new Western forms of economic organisation transformed Indian life and society.

Whether such a transformation is to be considered good or evil is a philosophical question outside the scope of this book—we are not called upon to arbitrate between Mr. Gandhi with his spinning wheel and Tatas with their great steel factory at Jamshapur. Our task is only to record the historical process by which the transformation came about and to analyse its effect on the lives of all classes of society.

We shall begin by considering the initial dislocation of the Indian economy in the early days of British power and we shall go on to study the effect of British currency and revenue administration. This will lead naturally to a consideration of the general economic and fiscal policy of the Company in India and to an examination of the ‘drain’ about which so much has been written. Irrigation, agriculture and railways will next occupy our attention, and we shall then be in a position to study urban affairs and the growth of commerce and industry under the Crown, with particular reference to the development of the Managing Agency system. Thereafter a study of industrial and financial policy in India under the Crown will put us in a position to estimate the net effect of all these developments on the economy of India and on the well-being of the Indian.

Chapter XXXIX

Disruption of the Indian Economy

For its first one hundred and fifty years the East India Company was merely a body of traders with no political power, concerned only to buy what India was prepared to sell and to offer foreign commodities or bullion in exchange. The advent of these new traders naturally stimulated India’s commerce and industry and directed exports into new and profitable channels. The overland trade to Europe had been seriously impeded by the closing of the old trade routes in the Middle Ages, but there was still a considerable trade with Persia, Arabia, Turkey and Tibet, carried on by Armenians, Persians, and other foreign merchants, and to a lesser extent by Hindus. In the seventeenth century several European companies were competing for the products of India, and, in modern parlance, there was therefore a ‘seller’s market’. The well-known French traveller Tavernier tells us that ‘Kasimbazar, a village of the kingdom of Bengal can furnish about 22,000 bales of silk annually, each bale weighing 100 livres. . . . The Dutch generally took, either for Japan or for Holland, 6,000 to 7,000 bales of it, and they would have liked to get more, but the merchants of Tartary and of the whole Moghul Empire opposed their doing so, for these merchants took as much as the Dutch, and the balance remained with the people of the country for the manufacture of their own stuffs’.

He goes on to relate how silk stuffs were exported by the Dutch to the Philippines, Borneo, Java and Sumatra; how the East India Company took large quantities of cotton cloth for Europe; and how other kinds of cloth were exported to Mozambique for sale ‘into the country of the Abbyssins and the kingdom of Saba, because these people, who do not use soap, need only simply rinse out these cloths’. Pyrard, a seventeenth-century Portuguese writer, went so far as to say that ‘everyone from the Cape of Good Hope to China, man and woman is clothed from head to foot’ in Indian-made garments. This was an exaggeration, but it is, at any rate, clear that in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries India produced much for export and that this production was stimulated by the European companies who soon became the principal exporters.

Their ‘factories’ or establishments soon became great centres of trade and importance. We learn from Bernier that in 1666 ‘the Dutch have sometimes seven or eight hundred natives employed in their silk factory at Kassem-Bazar, [Kazimbazaar] where, in like manner, the English and other merchants employ a proportionate number’. In Western India, under the fostering care of Gerald Aungier, Bombay grew rapidly and trebled its population within twenty years of its acquisition by the British. Madras grew almost as quickly in population and prosperity, while Calcutta outstripped all the other European settlements. Its population increased fourfold in the first half of the century, and by the time of Plassey its annual import and export trade amounted to £1,000,000 sterling.

Up to this stage India had benefited considerably by the advent of the European companies. A new phase opened, however, when the East India Company began to acquire political power, and in the first few decades after Plassey the inland trading operations of the Company’s servants, together with the Company’s ‘investments’ and the resulting shortage of specie, did much harm to India.

In India, tolls on the transit of goods within the country had, from time immemorial, been an important source of public revenue, and, as Mill tells us, ‘by the rude and oppressive nature of the government these custom-houses were exceedingly multiplied; and in long carriages the inconvenience of numerous stoppages and payments was very severe. As in all other departments of the government, so in this, there was nothing regular and fixed; the duties varied at different times and different places; and a wide avenue was always open for extortion by the collectors. The internal trade of the country was by these causes subject to ruinous obstructions’. The East India Company at an early stage sought exemption from an arrangement so unfavourable to foreign trade and in 1662 the then Governor of Bengal, Prince Shuja, exempted the English from all customs dues in the province in return for an annual payment of Rs. 3,000. The arrangement was not long respected by the local officials, and, moreover, it was not renewed by Prince Shuja’s successor, as required by Mughal practice. After a period of constant struggle and even war, the Company’s concessions were restored in 1691 by Ibrahim Khan, but were again revoked by Murshid Quli Khan, the next Subadar of Bengal. Murshid Quli Khan granted concessions to Arabian and other foreign merchants, but disliked the English and was not anxious to encourage their trade. To rectify this position John Surman took an embassy to Delhi in 1714 and in 1717 secured from the Emperor Farrukh-siyar a firman or grant exempting the Company from duty on all goods imported into or exported from Bengal, Bihar and Orissa by the English companies. ‘Whatever goods or merchandise their agents may bring or carry by land or water to the ports, quarters and borders of the provinces, know them to be custom free and let them have full liberty to buy and sell. Take annually the stated peshkush (payment) of three thousand rupees and besides that make no demand on any pretence.’ As a matter of procedure, the production of the dusluck or signature of the English president or chief of a factory, was sufficient to protect goods from all internal duties.

It must be particularly noted that the exemption applied only to goods imported or purchased for export and not to the trade internal to the country. It was in this internal trade alone that the Company allowed its servants to participate individually, and they soon sought to secure for themselves the exemption applicable to the overseas trade. The most obvious method of doing this was to pass off commodities of internal trade as being intended for Europe, and the searches which the nawab’s customs officers carried out in order to detect such frauds led to much friction. The possibility of abuse was, nevertheless, limited as long as the English were only foreign traders with no political power. The Company’s servants were able to carry on a good deal of surreptitious trade; but while the nawab still ruled the country they were excluded from the important trade in salt, betel-nut and tobacco. No change in the legal position with regard to these duties appeared when the Company deposed Siraj-ud-daula and installed Mir Jafar as Subadar of Bengal, but in reality the foundations of the nawab’s power had been undermined and the Company’s servants began to do as they liked.

They claimed the right to carry on internal trade free of all the duties paid by native traders and they denied the authority of the nawab’s customs officers to search or otherwise check their merchandise. Mill tells us that ‘so great was now the ascendancy of the English name, that the collectors or officers at the chokeys or toll houses, who were fully aware of the dependence of their own government on the power and pleasure of the English, dared not in general to scrutinise the use which was made of the Company’s dusluck or to stop the goods which it fraudulently screened. The Company’s servants, whose goods were thus conveyed entirely free from duty, while those of all other merchants were heavily burthened, were rapidly getting into their own hands the whole trade of the country, and thus drying up one of the sources of the public revenue’.

Nor did the evil stop here. The protection afforded by the Company’s duslucks was in practice so complete that they rapidly became saleable commodities. Indian merchants bought duslucks from the Company’s servants and carried on trade wherever possible under the British flag. Intoxicated with their own power and corrupted by the sight of boundless wealth within their grasp, the Company’s servants began ‘to force the unhappy natives, both to buy the goods of the Company’s servants, and of all who procured the use of their name, at a greater; and to sell to the Company’s servants the goods which they desired to purchase, at less than the market price’. On those occasions when the nawab’s officers dared to intervene, the Company’s servants did not scruple to use force against them. Before long the authority of the nawab was brought into universal contempt.

The most damning evidence of these practices comes not from Indians but from contemporary English sources; and in view of the effect on the Indian economy of these disorders, some of this evidence must be quoted. Thus Hastings, in a letter to the President dated 25th April 1762, quoted by Verelst, refers to ‘a grievance, which calls loudly for redress. I mean the oppressions committed under the sanction of the English name, and through want of spirit in the Nabob’s subjects to oppose them. This evil, I am well assured, is not confined to our dependants alone, but is practised all over the country by people assuming the habits of our Sepoys, and calling themselves our gomastahs.²⁰ As, on such occasions, the great power of the English intimidates the people from resistance, so, on the other hand, the indolence of the Bengalees, or the difficulty of gaining access to those who might do them justice, prevents our having knowledge of the oppressions, and encourages their continuance, to the great though unmerited, scandal of our government.

‘I have been surprised to meet with several English flags, flying in places which I have passed, and on the river I do not believe that I have passed a boat without one. By whatever title they have been assumed (for I could only trust the information of my eyes, without stopping to ask questions) I am sure their frequency can bode no good to the nabob’s revenues, the quiet of the country, or the honour of our nation. . . .

‘A party of sepoys who were on the march before us, afforded sufficient proofs of the rapacious and insolent spirit of those people, when left to their own discretion. Many complaints against them were made me on the road, and most of the petty towns and cerais were deserted at our approach, and shops shut up, from apprehension of the same treatment from us.’

Verelst, who a few years later was Governor in Calcutta, writes in A View of the English Government in Bengal that ‘the Subahdar Meer Cossim, about the same time, complains that the English agents plundered his people, injured and disgraced his servants, and exposed his government to contempt. They had established numerous factories, and setting up the English colours, oppressed the ryots, or husbandmen, the merchants, and people of the country. “Every Bengal gomostah makes a disturbance at every factory, and thinks himself not inferior to the company. In every purgunnah, every village, and every factory, they buy and sell salt, beetle-nut, ghee, rice, straw, bamboos, fish, gunnils, ginger, sugar, tobacco, opium, and many other things more than I can write, and which I think it needless to mention. They forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the ryots, merchants etc. for a fourth part of their value, and by ways of violence and oppressions, they oblige the ryots, etc. to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee; . . . and they allow not any authority to my servants; the officers of every district have desisted from the exercise of their functions; and everyone of these gomostahs has such power, that he imprisons the collector, and deprives him of all authority whenever he pleases”.’

And little later Verelst himself confirmed the truth of these complaints. ‘The cause of these events naturally became the subject of deliberation. It appeared, that an exemption from duties had thrown the whole trade of the country into the hands of the English. This, however, was the least evil. The country government was destroyed by the violence of their agents; and individual tyranny succeeded to national arrangement. In the general confusion, all, who were disposed to plunder, assumed the authority of our name, usurped the seats of justice, carried on what they called a trade, by violence and oppression. The Nabob’s officers either fled before them, or, joining the invader, divided the spoil. The barrier of the country government once broken down, it became impossible to stop the inundation. Mohamedan, Portuguese and Armenian alike, nay, every illiterate mariner who could escape from a ship, erected our flag, and acted as lord of the district around him.’

Further confirmation of these dismal facts is forthcoming from Mr. Vansittart, who succeeded Clive as Governor in Bengal. In his Narratives of the Transactions in Bengal he quotes numerous complaints against the Company’s servants, and, though some of them may have been exaggerated or untrue, Vansittart certainly accepts their general tenor. A typical complaint of one of the nawab’s officers will serve to illustrate this theme.

‘This place was of great trade formerly, but now brought to nothing by the following practices.

‘A gentlemen sends a gomostah here to buy or sell, he immediately looks upon himself as sufficient to force every inhabitant, either to buy his goods, or to sell him theirs; and on refusal (in case of non-capacity) a flogging or confinement immediately ensues. This is not sufficient even when willing, but a second force is made use of, which is to engross the different branches of trade to themselves, and not to suffer any persons to buy or sell the articles they trade in; and if the country people do it, then a repetition of their authority is put in practice; and again, what things they purchase, they think the least they can do is, to take them for a considerable deal less than another merchant and oftentimes refuse paying that, and my interfering occasions an immediate complaint.

‘These, and many other oppressions more than can be related, which are daily used by the Bengal gomostahs, is the reason that this place is growing destitute of inhabitants, every day numbers leave the town, to seek a residence more safe; and the very markets, which before afforded plenty, do hardly now produce anything of use, their peons being allowed to force poor people; and if the zemindar offers to prevent it, he is threatened to be used in the same manner.

‘Before, justice was given in the public cutcherree, but now every gomostah is become a judge, and everyone’s house a cutcherree; they even pass sentences on the zemindars themselves, and draw money from them by pretended injuries, such as a quarrel with some of their peons, or their having, as they assert, stole something, which is more likely to have been taken by their own people.’

Many of the Company’s servants treated the nawab’s officers with ill-concealed contempt. A Mr. Chevalier, accused, according to Vansittart, of ‘having acted in a very violent and arbitrary manner at Chilmaree and Coorgaum, by oppressing the merchants of those places in the monopoly of several commodities, particularly salt and tobacco, no one being allowed to buy or sell either of those articles but with his permission’, replied in a very lofty strain: ‘You write, that if I belong to the English I must have the English sunnud, and desire a copy of it to be sent you. In answer, I ask, who are you, that I should send you a copy of the sunnud? If you want to be informed who I am, and who sent me, send a man to the Chief who will answer you. If the people of your Pergunah are guilty of any insolence to mine, I shall chastise them handsomely for it.’

Mr. Ellis, the Company’s chief at Patna, was a particularly high-handed gentleman, and the nawab’s rather pathetic remonstrance with him is worthy of quotation: ‘I have just received intelligence, that you have sent a large force, and carried off a collector of the government who was at Punchmahla in the districts of Mongheer. If that person had committed any fault, it would have been proper to have informed me of it, since my interests and the Company’s are united. It ill became you to seize an officer of my government, who was entrusted with affairs of great consequence, and then to desire a letter to Sheer Allee Cawn. Since my servants are subjected to such insults, my writing can be of no use. You are the master, send for any of my officers, Zemindars, Tahsildars, or Fougedars, where and whomsoever you please. How much my government and authority are weakened by these proceedings I cannot describe. . . .’

Mr. Vansittart goes on to say ‘The truth is, that every struggle made by the country people against the oppressions and extortions of the private English gomostahs, was immediately construed as an attack upon the Company’s rights.’

A final quotation on this theme may be taken from the contemporary annals known as the Siyar Mutakharin: ‘They (the English) join the most resolute courage to the most cautious prudence; nor have they their equals in the art of ranging themselves in battle array and in fighting order. If to so many military qualifications they knew how to join the arts of government; if they showed a concern for the circumstances of the husbandman and the gentleman and exerted as much ingenuity and solicitude in the relieving and easing the people of God, as they do in whatever concerns their military affairs, no nation in the world would be preferable to them, or prove worthier of command. But such is the little regard which they show to the people of these kingdoms, and such their apathy and indifference for their welfare, that the people under their dominion groan everywhere, and are reduced to poverty and distress. O! God, come to the assistance of thine afflicted servants, and deliver them from the oppressions they suffer.’ The annalist may have been in some senses a prejudiced observer, but it is impossible not to recognise in this complaint the genuine voice of affliction.

The effects of this systematic oppression were felt by every class of society. The misuse of duslucks perhaps principally affected the merchant class, but the arbitrary fixation of prices and the compulsion to sell soon impoverished the weavers and other small producers. Interesting light is thrown on this by William Bolts, in his Considerations on Indian Affairs. Bolts was a bitter and unfair critic of the Company and his evidence must to some extent be discounted, but his main complaint is substantiated from many other sources. ‘The baneful effects . . . are severely felt by every weaver and manufacturer in the country, every article produced being made a monopoly; in which the English, with their Banyans and black gomostahs, arbitrarily decide what quantities of goods each manufacturer shall deliver, and the prices he shall receive for them. . . . Upon the gomostah’s arrival at the aurung, or manufacturing town, he first fixes upon a habitation which he calls his cutcherry; to which, by his peons and hircarahs he summons the brokers, called Dallals, and Pykars, together with the weavers; whom, after receipt of the money despatched by his master, he makes to sign a bond for the delivery of a certain quantity of goods, at a certain time and price, and pays them a part of the money in advance. The assent of the poor weaver is in general not deemed necessary, for the gomostah, when employed on the Company’s investment, frequently make them sign what they please; and upon the weavers refusing to take the money offered, it has been known that they have had it tied in their girdles, and they have been sent away with a flogging. . . . A number of these weavers are generally also registered in the books of the Company’s gosmostahs and not permitted to work for any others; being transferred from one to another as so many slaves, subject to the tyranny and roguery of every succeeding gomostah. . . . The roguery practised in this department is beyond imagination, but all terminates in the defrauding of the poor weaver; for the prices which the company’s gomostahs, and, in confederacy with them, the Jachendars (inspectors) fix upon the goods, are in all places at least fifteen per cent and in some cases even forty per cent less than the goods so manufactured would sell for in the public Bazaar, or market, upon a free sale. The weaver, therefore, desirous of obtaining the just price of labour, frequently attempts to sell his cloth privately to others. . . . This occasions the English Company’s gomostah to set his peons over the weaver to watch him, and not infrequently to cut the piece out of the loom when nearly finished.’

After Mir Kasim was established as nawab by the East India Company, in 1760, he struggled valiantly to put an end to these oppressions and to secure fair play for Indian merchants. He had the support of Vansittart and Hastings, but the majority of the Calcutta Council were determined to maintain the right of their servants to oppress the country, and the only result of the nawab’s attempts was his own deposition. At this time, however, the home authorities were becoming more aware of the oppressions that were being practised in their name and more sensible of the harm which this must do to their own interests. After a long-drawn-out controversy—and in spite of the efforts of the East India Company’s servants in Calcutta to resist and procrastinate—in 1768 the Court of Directors peremptorily ordered the discontinuance of the inland trade. ‘Past experience,’ they said, ‘has so impressed us with the idea of the necessity of confining our servants, and Europeans residing under our protection, within the ancient limits of our export and import trade, that we look on every innovation in the inland trade as an intrusion on the natural right of the natives of the country who now more particularly claim our protection.’ This order may be regarded as the first step in the long process of purification of the British administration in Bengal. Much harm, however, had already been done, and in 1767 Verelst wrote to the Court of Directors of ‘the uncommon scarcity of weavers that prevails at present at all the factories and Aurungs; whether this uncommon scarcity proceeds from the troubles in which the country was so lately overwhelmed, or whether it arises from the general decline of trade at all the ports in India, it is certain that a great number of the manufacturers in cloth have deserted their profession, to seek for subsistence from a less precarious calling’.

The only class which prospered in these few years consisted of the Company’s servants. We read of one who employed in one season thirteen thousand people in the manufacture of salt, and we are told by Verelst that ‘many black merchants found it expedient to purchase the name of any young writer in the Company’s service by loans of money . . .’ and that ‘so plentiful a supply was derived from this source, that before Lord Clive’s arrival many young writers were enabled to spend £1,500 and £2,000 per annum in clothes in fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day’.

It is obvious that these discreditable activities must have harmed the Indian trading classes considerably and that weavers and certain other producers must to a lesser extent have also been injured. There is, however, a danger of exaggerating their long-term effects; and, indeed, some Indian writers have gone so far as to regard them as the primary cause of India’s poverty. To correct this view it is necessary to remember, firstly, that these particular abuses were mainly confined to Bengal, and, secondly, that even in that province they were soon eradicated. They only began to assume serious proportions after the Battle of Plassey had raised the prestige and demonstrated the power of the English, and they ran riot for twelve years, until in 1768 the Company took the first effective step towards terminating the private inland trade of its servants. This was followed by more stringent provisions in the Regulating Act of 1773. Breaches of the rule continued to be not uncommon for another decade or so, but, as a serious factor affecting the economy of Bengal, the private inland trade of the Company’s administrative servants now came to an end.

The abuses connected with the inland trade were indeed merely one aspect of the oppression and maladministration which characterised the short period of power without responsibility. By 1773 the Company had openly accepted responsibility for the government of Bengal, the process of purifying the administration had begun, and the awakening of British public opinion made a return to the bad old days just after Plassey unlikely.

By this time, too, another important factor was at work. The Company, or at any rate its home authorities, were interested not so much in governing Bengal as in buying and selling. The provision of what was called their ‘investment’—i.e. the goods purchased for export to England—became the main consideration, and this led to serious attempts by the Company’s servants to stimulate industrial production. It should here be explained that the Company’s investment was organised partly through paid covenanted servants known as commercial residents or merchants and partly through unpaid contractors, who were frequently Europeans. Since the commercial residents had no connection with the general administration of the country, the prohibition of carrying on private inland trade did not apply to them. Their posts were therefore far more lucrative than those of the Company’s general administrators from about 1772 onwards, and many of the ablest and most energetic of the Company’s servants took care to go on to the commercial side. In some respects operations through contractors proved a more successful method of securing the investment than direct purchase by commercial residents, but the important point for our purpose is that only part of the capital required by the agents was put out by the Board of Trade, the rest being furnished by the contractors themselves. Commercial residents and European contractors thus alike had a direct personal interest in the growth of industry in their districts, and imported capital to facilitate this end. Their close association with the ruling power no doubt enabled them to treat the natives with a good deal of harshness, but it must be remembered that henceforth they were interested, not in ousting the private trader but in buying his wares, or, better still, in persuading textile and other workers to work in the factories and filatures which were soon established all over Bengal.

Sir William Hunter, who has studied the eighteenth-century records of the district of Beerbhoom in detail, writes thus in The Annals of Rural Bengal—‘Long before the Company deemed it necessary to assume the direct administration of the Western principalities, it had covered them with trading concerns; and indeed the peril into which the Rajahs’ misrule brought the factories, formed one of the main reasons that induced Lord Cornwallis to take Beerbhoom under his own care. A commercial resident supervised the whole, and three head factories, in conveniently central positions, regulated the operations of twelve other subordinate ones. Silk, cotton, cloths, fibres, gums and lac dye, furnished the staple articles of the Beerbhoom investment. Mulberry-growing communes fringed the margin of the great western jungle, and every bend of the Adji on the south, and of the More on the north, disclosed a weaving village. These little industrial colonies dwelt secure amid the disorders of the times, protected not by walls or trained bands, but by the terror of the Company’s name. They afforded an asylum for the peaceable craftsman when the open country was overrun; and after the harvest of the year had been gathered in, the husbandman transported thither the crop, with his wife and oxen, and brazen vessels, careless of what the banditti might do to the empty shell of his mud hovel. Some of these unfortified strongholds grew into important towns; and as one set of names tell of a time when the country seems to have been divided between robbers and wild beasts, so another, such as Tattiparah (weaving village) disclose how the artisans and small merchants found protection by clustering together under the Commercial Resident’s wing.’ ‘The sum spent upon the mercantile investment there in Beerbhoom,’ continues Sir William Hunter, ‘is from £45,000 to £65,000 a year. The weavers worked upon advances. Every head of a family in a company’s village had an account at the factory, where he attended once a year for the purpose of seeing his account made up, and the value of the goods which he had from time to time delivered set off against the sums he had received. The balance was then struck, a new advance generally given, and the account reopened for the ensuing year.’ This narrative of Beerbhoom has parallels in many other districts, and it is probable that by the time of Lord Cornwallis the stimulus to industrial production provided by the Company had counteracted the harm which had been done to the Bengal economy in the first few years after Plassey.

Chapter XL

Currency Problems

It is now necessary to turn from the inland trade to a brief study of imports and exports and of the balance of trade and payments. Here, as in the previous chapter, we shall be particularly concerned with Bengal. Fortunately a good deal of contemporary evidence on this subject exists, particularly in Verelst’s A View of the English Government in Bengal, Shore’s famous Minute of 1789, and The Third Report of the House of Commons on the East India Company, 1773.

Before the time of Siraj-ud-doula Bengal had a permanent excess of exports over imports and thus attracted to herself vast quantities of specie. ‘Though our provinces,’ said Verelst, ‘afford no gold, silver, or precious stones, yet the vast variety and abundance of the produce of the lands, and the excellence of the manufactures of the inhabitants, leave them no great occasion for imported commodities; and, at the same time, invite foreign merchants to purchase and export these goods and manufactures, from their superior cheapness and quality. I have observed, that the natives had occasion for few foreign commodities, either for convenience or for luxury, and, consequently, a very small proportion of their trade could be carried on by barter, and the rest only by giving specie for goods. The extent also of this traffic was prodigious; and besides the large investments of the different European nations, the Bengal raw silk, cloths, etc., to a vast amount were dispersed to the West and North, inland; as far as Guzzerat, Lahore, and even Ispahan. In proportion, therefore, to this diffusion of commerce, the quantity of specie in the country necessarily increased, the farmer and workman were enabled to answer the demands of government with ease, by the readiness of their sales; and every extension of industry at home, or trade abroad, was a new opening to an advance of the general opulence.’

When the East India Company began to operate in Bengal, it, too, discovered that the province had much to sell, but that its people wanted to buy little. Had the Company been free to pay in bullion for all it wished to buy it probably would not have bothered at all about importing goods into Bengal. Current English economic thought, however, regarded export of bullion as unsound and the Company had therefore to develop its export trade to Bengal as much as possible. It often found this unprofitable, and woollen goods proved particularly difficult; metals sold rather better, but here the East India Company had to face keen competition from Dutch imports from the Far East. The one thing that Indian merchants really wanted was bullion and it is estimated that in the first half of the eighteenth century three-quarters of the Company’s imports to Bengal consisted of bullion.

From 1757 onwards, although the Company encouraged the export of raw silk and other raw materials, the balance of payments was completely reversed. Instead of receiving specie, Bengal began to export either bullion or commodities to meet the demands arising from the political domination of the English. The Company no longer exported bullion from England to India in substantial amounts.

The first cause of the reversal was the payment of considerable sums by way of presents to the Company’s servants or as compensation for losses sustained by the Company and by individuals when Siraj-ud-daula captured Calcutta. The Select Committee appointed by the House of Commons in 1773 examined this matter carefully and found that from 1756 to 1765 these payments amounted to £2,169,655 in respect of presents and £3,770,833 on account of compensation, or £5,940,488 in all ‘exclusive of Lord Clive’s Jaghir’. Some portion of this large sum was no doubt spent in India, but most of it was sent to England and was a dead loss to India.

At a slightly later date there were, according to Clive, only two ways in which the Company’s servants could with propriety remit their fortunes—by bills on the Company or in diamonds. Up to 1765, however, the Company would not allow such bills to be drawn upon it, and even when this policy was changed some of the other foreign companies gave better rates. Remittances of presents and compensation thus played into the hands of other European companies. Of the decline in India’s specie position, Verelst states: ‘The decline was neither sensibly felt by the country, nor perceptible to us, till after the revolution in favour of Meer Jaffer. This threw such considerable sums into the hands of the Company, as to render their importing bullion for their investment unnecessary; and the large fortunes obtained, in consequence, by individuals, who were precluded the course of remittance through your cash, filled the treasures of foreign nations, in exchange for bills on their respective Companies; so that ever since the country came into our possession, they have been enabled to rival us in trade, in our territories, with our own money.’ Payment by Indian rulers for military services strengthened this effect. More important, however, was the use of the Company’s territorial surplus for the purchase of the ‘investment’, i.e. the goods to be shipped to England for sale. The Company had acquired the revenues of vast territories which Clive estimated would produce a balance of over £1,500,000 annually. ‘Your revenues, by means of this acquisition, will, as near as I can judge, not fall far short for the ensuing year of 250 lakhs of Sicca Rupees, including your former possessions of Burdwan, etc. Hereafter they will at least amount to twenty or thirty lakhs more. Your civil and military expenses in time of peace can never exceed sixty lakhs of Rupees; the Nabob’s allowances are already reduced to forty-two lakhs, and the tribute to the King [the Great Mughal] at twenty-six; so that there will be remaining a clear gain to the Company of 122 lakhs of Sicca Rupees or £1,650,900 sterling. . . .’

The Home authorities were determined to share this accession of wealth, and from 1767 the Company was required to pay £400,000 per annum to the Home Government, and at the same time dividends were increased. The mechanism by which this was achieved was a stepping up of the investments, payments being made out of the surplus territorial revenues. Shore says in his famous Minute of 1789: ‘The Company are merchants as well as sovereigns of the country. In the former capacity they engross its trade, while in the latter they appropriate the revenues. The remittances to Europe of revenues are made in the commodities of the country which are purchased by them. . . . Every information from the time of Bernier to the acquisition of the Dewani shows the internal trade of the country, as carried on between Bengal and the upper parts of Hindustan, the Gulf of Moro, the Persian Gulf, and the Malabar Coast, to have been very considerable. Returns of specie and goods were made through these channels by that of the foreign European companies, and in gold dust for opium from the eastward. . . .

‘But from the year 1765 the reverse has taken place. The Company’s trade produces no equivalent returns. Specie is rarely imported by the foreign companies, nor brought into Bengal from other parts of Hindustan in any considerable quantities.’

Verelst deals with this matter in greater detail and shows that for the three years 1766–9 the Company’s exports amounted to £5,686,875 against which imports of bullion by the Company amounted only to £624,375. Figures of imports of commodities for the same period are not readily available, but they must have been comparatively small.

In 1783 the Select Committee of the House of Commons set forth the position with great clarity in their Ninth Report: ‘A certain portion of the revenues of Bengal has been, for many years, set apart for the purchase of goods for exportation to England, and this is called the “Investment”. The greatness of this Investment has been the standard by which the merit of the Company’s principal servants has been too generally estimated; and this main cause of the impoverishment of India has been generally taken as a measure of its wealth and prosperity. Numerous fleets of large ships, loaded with the most valuable commodities of the East, annually arriving in England in a constant and increasing succession, imposed upon the public eye, and naturally gave rise to the opinion of the happy condition and growing opulence of a country whose surplus productions occupied so vast a space in the commercial world. This export from India seemed to imply also a reciprocal supply, by which the trading capital employed in those productions was continually strengthened and enlarged. But the payment of a tribute, and not a beneficial commerce, to that country, wore this specious and delusive appearance.’

It is difficult to determine the amount of Bengal’s adverse balance of payments, but J. B. Sinha in the Economic Annals of Bengal has made a well-reasoned estimate amounting to £38,000,000 for the period 1757 to 1780. There are some grounds for regarding this estimate as too high, but it may safely be put at over £30,000,000 sterling or an average of £1,250,000 per annum. The Company’s Bengal revenues at this time amounted to less than £4,000,000 annually, and it will be seen that nearly one-third of the total revenue was drained out of the country.

The ‘investment’ continued to be financed out of the territorial surplus until 1813, when the Company’s territorial and commercial accounts were separated. In the meantime, revenue and expenditure both rose considerably, but the annual sums spent on the investments continued fairly constant, averaging £1,300,000 for the period 1793 to 1812.

The considerable drain of bullion from Bengal to England or China arising in the years after Plassey from the causes described above undoubtedly did harm to the economy of the country, but it is wrong to suppose that it was the sole cause of the shortage of specie which so seriously affected the trade of the country. In reality that shortage was acute for one or two decades before 1757—the operations of the Company after Plassey aggravated but did not create it. A contemporary traveller, quoted in the Economic Annals of Bengal, reported in 1750 that after the despatch of the annual tribute to Delhi ‘there is hardly currency enough left in Bengal to carry on any trade or even to go to markets for provisions and necessaries of life till the next shipload arrives to bring in a fresh supply’. It is not clear when exactly this shortage began to be experienced, but doubtless an important factor in it was the annual tribute of over £1,000,000 sterling to the Mughal emperor. Some part of this tribute no doubt returned to Bengal in payment for the many commodities manufactured there, but the net loss to Bengal must have been considerable.

The loss occurred, moreover, at a time when the currency was in disorder all over India. As long as the Mughal emperor remained strong, rupees of uniform weight and fineness were issued from the Imperial Mint, and in the Ain-i-Akbari there are minute instructions in the art of minting and assaying coins. This did not, however, mean that all current rupees had a uniform value. Tavernier, who in his Travels deals in some details with currency questions, reports thus: ‘They say that the longer a rupee of silver has been coined the less is it worth in comparison with those newly coined, or which have been coined a short time, because the old ones having often passed by hand, become worn, and they are in consequence lighter. Thus, when you make a sale, it is necessary to say that you require to be paid in Shahjahani rupees, i.e. in new silver, otherwise your payment will be made in rupees coined fifteen or twenty years or more, upon which there may be up to 4 per cent of loss. For, in the case of those which had not been coined within two years ¼ per cent is demanded or at least ⅛th: and the poor people who do not know how to read the year when these rupees or paisa were coined are liable to be cheated, because something is always deducted from them, one paisa or half paisa on a rupee, and on the paisa three or four cowries.’

Except for this factor of depreciation, the silver currency in Tavernier’s time was highly satisfactory. The silver issued from the Emperor’s treasury was never base and ‘as for false silver, this is little met with. If by chance there should be a false rupee in a bag given by a private merchant, it pays better to cut it and to lose it than to say anything about it, because if it becomes known you run some risk, the order of the Emperor being that you must return the bag to him from whom you received it, and thence it passes from one to another until the false coiner is discovered, and when one is detected, for sole punishment a finger is merely lopped off.’

In the early eighteenth century the general anarchy then characteristic of India affected currency also. Many different mints were established all over the country, and, although the Bengal authorities maintained the purity of the imperial coins fairly well, those which came from other provinces were frequently either short-weight or debased. They were naturally subject to discount, and the arbitrary manner in which this was fixed by the local bankers created great confusion. Rupees of different years were virtually treated as different coins; thus rupees two years old were called sonaut rupees and were only worth 100/111 of the sicca rupees. Majumdar and Ray Chaudhuri tell us that ‘it has been estimated that as many as 994 different types of coins, both gold and silver, were current in India at this time’.

The coinage was thus both unreliable and in short supply before the English acquired power. The situation, however, grew worse after Plassey. In his oft-quoted Minute of 1789 Shore wrote that ‘since the Company’s acquisition of the dewanny, the current specie of the country has been greatly diminished in quantity; that the old channels of importation, by which the drains were formerly replenished, are now in a great measure closed; and that the necessity of supplying China, Madras, and Bombay, with money, as well as the exportation of it by Europeans to England, will contribute still further to exhaust the country of its silver’.

Sincere but unscientific attempts by early English administrators to support the coinage made things worse rather than better. An excellent study of this rather technical subject has been made by Mr. J. C. Sinha in The Economic Annals of Bengal, and here we need only summarise the salient points. Clive attempted to remedy the shortage by introducing bimetallism, but the value of the gold coins was fixed too high in ratio to silver and nobody would accept the gold coins except at a substantial discount. Silver thus began to be hoarded on a big scale and the shortage of silver currency came to be more serious than ever. Some English merchants at Calcutta sent a petition to Verelst, from which it appears that hoarding and profiteering were important elements in the situation: ‘Before the gold Mohurs were called in, the Shroffs had so far taken the advantage of the necessity of individuals, that they had made the changing of money, from a bare livelihood, to a most advantageous trade to themselves, and a distressful tax upon every man who wanted money beyond the bounds of Calcutta; yet, at that very time, any sum might have been had in silver, by paying a high premium to those people who had it in their possession. From this we are led to believe, that there is still specie sufficient for the trade of Bengal, though perhaps not enough to answer the currency of this extensive town; and that if any method could be fallen upon to keep the Shroffs to their proper sphere, and prevent their taking advantage of the necessities of those who carry on trade to the Aurungs, a gold coin might still be made a convenient and useful currency for this settlement, though not for the trade of Bengal in general; whereas at present the distress is so great, that every merchant in Calcutta is in danger of becoming bankrupt, or running a risk of ruin by attachments on his goods, which would not sell for half their value, it being impossible to raise a large sum at any premium on bond.’ Internal commerce indeed almost came to a standstill. To meet the situation a gold currency, more modestly valued, was issued, but this, too, was a failure.

A few years later Warren Hastings took the problem in hand and began by directing that all rupees minted after a certain date should have the same regnal year inscribed on them, so that the practice of discounting rupees with their increasing age should be stopped. A little later, after long and bitter controversies between Hastings, the Council and the Board of Directors, it was decided to return to a purely silver currency, to standardise the value of all future rupees and to call in all lesser-value rupees for recoinage. The recall was in the end not made compulsory, the old rupees continued for some time to be current and the new standard or sicca rupees were inadequate for the trade of the country. The gold coinage was therefore resumed in 1780, but it was not found possible to establish any stable relation between the gold and the silver coinage.

Cornwallis next took the matter up, and, after numerous and conflicting theories and experiments, by 1795 the standard ‘19th sun sicca rupee’ became legal tender throughout Bengal and all other rupees were declared to be of no monetary value. Perhaps unfortunately, in 1790 Cornwallis had reintroduced the gold coinage which had twice been tried and abandoned by the East India Company. Once again the problem of unstable relations between gold and silver coins appeared. In the following decade the increased import of silver removed the disparity between gold and silver, but soon a contrary disparity developed and gold mohors disappeared. In 1835 the standard silver rupee became the full legal tender for the whole of British India. At last the Company, after much deep thought and genuine concern for the economic soundness of the country, had brought it back to the currency position of the great Mughal emperors.

Chapter XLI

Land Revenue

Throughout Indian history the land revenue has been the biggest single factor in the economic life of the country and the impact of the British or any other government must be largely determined by its revenue policy. In an earlier chapter we examined some of the main principles of revenue administration; here we shall briefly consider the incidence of the revenue and its effect on the people under the Company and the Crown. Bengal naturally falls to be considered first.

When the East India Company took over the administration of that province they found no existing machinery for revision of the revenue settlements and no available and accurate information as to what revenue had in fact been collected in the past. Such information as existed was in the possession of Indian subordinate officials, who had not the slightest intention of passing it on to their new masters; there was an inevitable period of floundering and experimentation, characterised by excessive assessments and considerable hardship to the agriculturist.

By the time of Cornwallis considerable knowledge of Mughal finance had been acquired and it had become clear that, whereas the revenue demand had remained almost stationery in Bengal in the seventeenth century, between 1722 and 1763 it had almost doubled. It was necessary to consider whether the 1763 level was reasonable and capable of realisation. On this point, as we have already seen, the two leading experts of the day, Sir John Shore and Mr. James Grant, disagreed completely. Grant considered that, on the old theory that the state should take a quarter of the produce, the 1763 demand was justified. It was true that it included many illegal imposts which had grown up during the declining days of the Mughal Empire, but according to Mr. Grant these imposts were outweighed by the increased value of the produce. Sir John Shore regarded the later Mughal assessment as excessive and argued that it had never been realised in practice. He was able to show that the remittances to the Imperial Treasury fell far short of the demand. Grant countered with the statement that collections had in fact almost equalled the assessments, but that large-scale defalcations had taken place before the proceeds were remitted to the Treasury;—such defalcations were, he contended, still going on in the British period. The popular view today is that Shore was in the main right and that the later Mughal demand was excessive. It is certainly true that the severity of the suffering in the great 1770 famine indicated a lack of any reserve of financial strength in the villages, which would be the natural result of excessive assessment over a long period. On the other hand, Grant’s statistical reasoning is cogent. He estimates that of the ninety thousand square miles of Bengal about one-fifth were under cultivation. This is generally accepted as correct, and, as Mr. Ascoli points out in his admirable Early Revenue History of Bengal, even lower estimates of productivity than those taken by Grant would justify a higher assessment than that of 1763.

The Permanent Settlement of Bengal in 1793 was based on the actual realisations during the twenty-year period of British revenue administration; and the significance for us of the Grant-Shore controversy thus arises from the fact that the demand under the Permanent Settlement was almost the same as that of 1763.

Those who take the Shore view naturally regard the revenue fixed in 1793 as excessive, and they support their contention by reference to the very large number of zemindaries summarily sold under the ‘sunset’ law within the first two decades after the Permanent Settlement. There is some ground, however, for thinking that in many cases the defaults arose not so much from inability to pay as from a determination to force the Government to abolish the sale law—and that the zemindars were fortified in their determination by ‘knowing that no purchaser can get possession’. Mr. Ascoli goes so far as to say that the confusion which followed the Permanent Settlement was mainly due to the continuancy of the proprietors, whose object was the annulment of the sale law.

The fair conclusion is perhaps that the Revenue had indeed been somewhat, but not grossly, overestimated. More important was the stringency with which it was realised. In the days of the later Mughal Empire there was often a world of difference between theory and practice; the existence of a possibly exorbitant demand did not necessarily mean that it was realised. Under the Company’s rule, the Zemindar either paid or lost his zemindari, so that over-assessment did in reality operate harshly. Under such circumstances it might be thought that this must have meant undue pressure on the cultivators by the landlord, and such pressure was doubtless facilitated by the power of distraint given to zemindars. In practice, at that time a good deal of the land of Bengal was uncultivated and the primary concern of the zemindar must have been to secure fresh cultivators or to persuade existing cultivators to take over more land. Under such circumstances the possibilities of oppression were limited, and where revenue was really excessive bidders were therefore not forthcoming at revenue sales. In such cases resettlement for a lower revenue was made. Within twenty years of the Permanent Settlement revenue had thus become reasonably well adjusted to economic facts and the system began to work smoothly from the point of view both of the landlords and of government. Rising prices in the nineteenth century soon removed any possibility that the revenue might be excessive, and by the end of the century most officials regarded it as altogether inadequate.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the landlord became too powerful and the rapid growth of population caused competition for land to replace competition for cultivators. This necessitated the legislative protection of the cultivator which was supplied by the Rent Act of 1859 and subsequent Acts. Thereafter the limitation of the landlord’s revenue and the tenant’s rent put the agricultural classes of Bengal in an exceptionally favourable position—until the growth of the class of landless labourers at a later date began to present fresh problems.

There is room for doubt as to whether the Permanent Settlement of what was then the main source of national revenue was wise, and of late Indian politicians have been most anxious to undo the effects of the Permanent Settlement. It must, however, be admitted that after an initial period of error and even harshness British revenue policy in Bengal was remarkably lenient and should have been conducive to agricultural prosperity.

To study the next phase in British revenue policy we must turn to Madras. Several different principles of revenue settlement were followed in that Presidency and all we can do here is to call attention to the level of the demands fixed in a few typical cases. One of the most interesting of the Permanent Settlements in Madras was that of the Northern Circars. The Northern Circars were acquired by the Company along with the diwani of Bengal, and there, as in Bengal, there was a period of blunders and excessive assessments. A little later a more scientific approach became possible, and in 1789 a zemindari settlement on the basis of fixing the revenue at two-thirds of the average gross collection from tenants was made. Bengal influence was now strong, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Settlement in the Northern Circars was made permanent.

Another interesting Permanent Settlement was that of the Southern Polygars. As we have seen earlier, the polygars were village headmen who had become minor local chiefs in parts of the Carnatic. Their independent existence was regarded as a danger, and the decision to suppress their political power led to somewhat harsh treatment of them in revenue matters. In 1779–1800 they were assessed at a revenue which exceeded the previous demand by 117 per cent. An insurrection resulted and many polygars were deprived of their land, but in 1803 those who remained were granted a more reasonable settlement, based on from 40 to 50 per cent of the gross rental.

The next twenty years were largely occupied in the Madras Presidency with the controversy as to the relative merits of settlement with zemindars, raiyats²¹ and village communities and also with the discussion as to whether settlements should be permanent or not. In the meantime, many temporary settlements were made and ultimately the raiyatuari principle prevailed. Sir Thomas Munro, perhaps the greatest Madras authority of his day, held strongly that settlement should be with raiyats and that the Government rent should not exceed one-third of the produce. In a report dated 15th August 1807 on the districts which had been ceded by the Nizam of the Deccan in 1800, Munro affirmed that ‘if more than one-third is demanded as rent, there can be no private landed property, for it is found that when land, which has formerly been enaum, is assessed, that as long as the rate is not more than one-third of the produce, the land is regarded as a private estate, and can generally be sold; but that whenever the rate exceeds one-third, the land is scarcely ever saleable,—it is no longer reckoned private property, and is often abandoned. It is also found by experience, that one-third of the produce is the rate of assessment at which persons, who are not themselves cultivators, can rent land from Government without loss; for it enables them, after paying the public demand, and being reimbursed for all expenses and stock employed, to retain a small portion of land-rent. As one-third of the produce is therefore the highest point to which assessment can in general be carried, without destroying private landed property; and as it is also the point to which it must be lowered, before persons who are not cultivators can occupy circar land without loss; it is obvious that unless the assessment is reduced to this rate, land can neither be occupied by all classes of the inhabitants, nor ever become private landed property; nor can any permanent settlement be made, calculated to improve the condition of the ryots, or of the public revenue. I am therefore of opinion, that in a permanent settlement of the Ceded Districts, the rent of government should be about one-third of the gross produce. The present assessment is about 45 per cent. To bring it to the proposed level, would require a remission of 25 per cent. . . . Supposing that this remission is allowed, its being, granted to zemindars or to ryots, would make a very material difference to the country’.

The Board of Revenue could not deny the soundness of Munro’s contentions but they pleaded necessity: ‘If the exigencies of Government allowed of so great a sacrifice as a remission on the present standard rents to the extent of 25 per cent or even of 15 per cent we should consider the measure highly advisable and calculated to produce great ulterior advantages. Indeed, it would be idle to dispute that the less we take from the cultivator of the produce of his labour the more flourishing must be his condition. . . . But if the exigencies of Government do not permit them to make so great a sacrifice . . . if they cannot afford to give up a share of the landlord’s rent, they must be indulgent landlords.’ In the Ceded Districts, in spite of Munro’s advice, revenue was increased by 50 per cent during the settlement.

The raiyat wari system advocated by Munro was based on moderate assessment and permanence of tenure. Neither of these principles was accepted and Henry Tucker, a Director of the Company, frankly stated that ‘the object of this system is to obtain for government the utmost that the land will yield in the case of rent’. By 1820 the raiyat wari system had been accepted in principle and began to be widely introduced. The demand was generally fixed at between 45 per cent and 55 per cent of the gross produce as against the 33⅓ per cent which Munro had considered proper. Munro himself, as Governor of Madras from 1820 onwards, reduced many of the assessments, but the official correspondence of the time is nevertheless full of evidence of over-assessment. Some of it has been collected by Mr. R. C. Dutt in his Economic History of India under Early British Rule, and two quotations from this collection will illustrate the theme. The Collector of Trichinopoly writes in 1821 that ‘the same features, of distress and poverty which must ever accompany a rack rent, are but too visible in Trichinopoly, and the ruin of all agricultural improvements is evident in the depreciation of the value of landed property. Mirasdars who formerly farmed an extent of land amounting to some thousand Cawnies, now possess scarcely as many hundreds, and these will be sold in the course of this or the ensuing year, if either the assessment is not altered or the balance of arrears allowed to lay over. But what I chiefly wish to impress upon the Board is my conviction of the impossibility of continuing in the present assessment’. Again with regard to Arcot, the Court of Directors wrote in 1824: ‘The Collector and the Board of Revenue are unwilling to acknowledge our assessment. They declare the assessment to be “as high as the exhausted state of the country could bear”, but express a confident expectation that it could be realised. They allege, however, that under such an assessment the country could not improve, and in order to afford it the means of improving, they propose a reduction from 7 to 10 per cent.’

Many other quotations from contemporary records could be cited. We must leave the matter here, with the bald statement that for the first two decades of the nineteenth century, large areas of the Madras Presidency were over-assessed.

In Northern India certain districts which later became part of the United Provinces were ceded to the Company by the Nawab of Oudh, while Agra and other districts were annexed at the end of the Maratha War. The work of settlement was at once taken up, with the following results as reported by Henry Wellesley in 1803.

	lakhs of rupees
Assessment before the British period	135
British assessment first year	156
British assessment second year	161
British assessment third year	168

There can be little doubt that these demands were excessive, but even apart from that fact the settlements were thoroughly unsatisfactory in their distribution of the liability to pay. Kaye, the historian of the East India Company, tells us that ‘the system of land-revenue which obtained at this time was based upon the old establishment of village communities. These institutions existed but in an imperfect, fragmentary state; and when the officers of the British Government began hastily and loosely to establish some intelligible system of revenue collection, or at all events to make out clearly the parties to whom the State were to look for the apportioned amount of revenue, they groped about painfully in the dark. All sorts of claimants arose with tides good, bad, and indifferent, and flocked to the Collector’s Court at the chief station, urging their proprietary rights. Embarrassed by these conflicting claims, the Collector placed himself in the hands of the “Canoongo” or native Notary, and decided according to his dictum upon the claims that were laid before him. There was little or no enquiry, and the decision was often wrong. The amount of revenue had then to be fixed; and here again the authority of the village functionary was generally followed, and the valuation was generally wrong. The difficulty of the task was very great and it would have been strange if our first efforts had been more successful’. The asperity of the demand was softened by the promise of a Permanent Settlement; but although this promise was incorporated in two regulations, at a later date the Court of Directors repudiated it and continued temporary settlements. In spite of the protests of some of the ablest revenue officials of the day, the land revenue in Northern India was raised by nearly 45 per cent between 1807 and 1818. In 1822 a system of cadastral survey was inaugurated in upper India and the revenue was fixed at five-sixths of the net rental. This is high by more modern standards, but not in comparison with Mughal assessments. The chief defect was that no uniform rates were laid down and the revenue officers were left with complete discretion in assessing the produce and the cost of cultivation of each field—an impossible task. Lord William Bentinck reduced the demand to two-thirds of the net rental and abandoned the theoretical estimates with regard to individual fields. The land revenue was fixed for each particular tract of country on the basis of history and existing facts and then apportioned appropriately. This plan was known as the ‘aggregate to detail’ plan. It was carried out from 1833 to 1849 by Merttins Bird, a famous settlement officer, whose liberal administration did much to mitigate the evils of the earlier settlements. The procedure followed is vividly described by Bird himself. ‘We then proceeded to investigate the assessment of the Government Land Tax upon that tract. . . . As soon as that was ascertained, we fixed the amount of the Government tax we should require upon the whole of that tract, and then we proceeded to set down the amount that we should require upon each village. . . . The people then came forward and met the Collector. They generally met, as is our way of doing business in India, under the shade of a tree or in an open field. . . . In many instances objections were made; they said “This is too high; my village will not pay this; it is a poor village”. They were then told that we intended to have that amount of revenue from the whole tract, and that, therefore, if there was any objection regarding that village, they must point out who could pay more; and this set them to discuss the matter among themselves. . . . The assessment upon the whole tract was not strictly maintained; it was not our object to do so; we were ready to reduce it if we found cause to do so; but the object of demanding this first in a lump sum was to induce them to look into their own concerns, and to come to such an adjustment as they should find to be satisfactory.’ Bird recognised that revenue had been initially fixed too high in most of the provinces under the Company’s rule, and he strove to avoid this error. According to his own estimate the revenue now fixed should not exceed one-tenth of the gross produce. In this settlement an attempt was made to maintain the responsibilities—and indeed the existence—of the village communities which were an important feature in Northern India. George Campbell, who wrote on the subject with authority, stated that ‘the most common tenure of all in the North West is that where a village belongs not to a single individual, but to a single family. In this case the great proportion of the land is cultivated by tenants; and the sharers have not their shares separately divided off—the tenants are the tenants of all in common. The proprietors generally live in the village and their own cultivation is taken into account at lower rates. The whole collections are brought together, the revenue paid, and the surplus divided among the proprietors, according to the fractional share possessed by each. Where there are many proprietors, one or two are chosen representatives and managers.’ A further form of joint ownership was that known as putteedoree or shareholders’ tenure. This has been accurately described as ‘cultivation in severalty with joint responsibility’.

Bird’s efforts to maintain these joint communities were not in the end successful, for the British system necessarily led to the fixing of the responsibility for the revenue on the headman and he in due course became the virtual landlord. Bird’s attempt, nevertheless, illustrates the new spirit that was now growing up and the increasing desire to preserve old institutions and traditions. Unfortunately harm had, however, already been done, and in many cases old landholders had been defrauded of their estates by individuals sharp enough to take advantage of the new and bewildering law introduced by the English. ‘Many a man,’ said Kaye, ‘found that he had lost his old territorial rights simply because the new English rulers had described him by a certain word, the dire import of which he himself by no means clearly understood. The revenue-contractors under the first settlement were set down in the Government records, with few exceptions, as Moostajirs, or Farmers. There was another column, headed with the word Malik, signifying Proprietor, which was generally a blank in the original book. The contractor little knew the relative importance of the two words . . . when the period for which he had first contracted was at an end, he found how “the letter killeth”. The astute native functionaries, . . . devised a scheme whereby a large portion of the land was swept into their own possession. When the original lease granted to the recorded Moostajirs was at an end, the native functionaries reported that the first contractors were only farmers—that they had no proprietary rights at all—but that certain other men, whose names were then mentioned (principally Musulman names), were the legitimate proprietors, and ought to be so entered in the Government books. The Collectors placed too much confidence in these specious stories, and the names of some men of straw—some relatives or dependants of the native officials—crept into the column of the register, headed with the word Malik. The man of straw made way in due time for the real Jacob.’

Examples of fraud or error can easily be multiplied. Settlement operations required deep and intimate knowledge of the people concerned. Where—as in Bengal when the Company stood forth as Diwan, or in the North-West Frontier Provinces in 1803—settlements had to be effected before that knowledge had been acquired, chaos and widespread injury were bound to result. Gradually men like Munro, Thomason and Bird acquired the necessary knowledge and rectified the mistakes of the earlier days. Kaye rightly contrasts the first settlement which ‘ruined the persons for whose benefit it was devised’ with the Bird settlement which ‘saved millions of much-enduring men from ruin and misery’. The same author writing in 1853 quotes a letter from a ‘distinguished British functionary’ who thus reported in 1852: ‘I have just marched to this place along the strip of country reaching from the Sutlej to the Jumna by Hansi and Nissar. You must remember that country when it was inhabitated by a wild and lawless set of people, whom no one could manage. Native chiefs would not take the lands at a gift. Our own troops were frequently repulsed by the communities of Rangurs, and Bhuttees, and others, who lived in large fortified villages and subsisted by plunder. Now the country is thickly inhabited and well cultivated, and the most peaceful that could possibly be. This year the “Khurreef” crops have failed entirely, and very little Rubbee has been sown. Yet the revenue had been paid up without a balance, and had occasioned no perceptible distress. This is the effect of firm rule and a light assessment. Mr. R. Bird (all honour to his name!) insisted, at the late settlement, on a considerable reduction of the assessment. The consequence is, that land which before was worthless now bears a high value, and the people who were before lawless now yield implicit obedience to the laws. It is a cheap government of which the strength consists in low taxation.’

After the early mistakes, resulting largely from ignorance, had been put right, there was a gradual improvement in the technique and principles of settlement operations. This process may be seen at work in the Bombay Presidency. In 1818 Mountstuart Elphinstone, as Commissioner of the territories just taken from the Peshwa, issued to his Collectors instructions to make the assessment light. In 1821, as Governor of Bombay, he recorded several notes on settlement operations in the district. In Broach he observed that the general principle of taking half the money produced by the sale of the crops resulted in a substantial increase in revenue, ‘a circumstance which I cannot contemplate with pleasure’. In Ahmadabad he noted ‘a tendency to strain the revenue to the highest pitch’ while as regards Surat he felt that the greatest obstacle to improvement ‘will be the extreme heaviness and perhaps the inequality of the assessment’.

In 1821–2 Chaplin, the Commissioner of the Deccan, adopted a standard of one-third of the produce as the basis of his assessment. Unfortunately the settlement, carried out under the control of Pringle, was most inefficient, and estimates of produce had little relation to reality. According to the Bombay Administration Report of 1872 they were indeed ‘so erroneous as to be almost useless’. The revenue fixed was beyond the capacity of the people to pay; arrears accumulated on a great scale; and many cultivators fled. ‘Large tracts of land were thrown out of occupation and in some districts no more than one third of the cultivable area remained in occupation.’ The impossibility of continuing on this basis was recognised, and in 1835 a fresh survey under Wingate and others was commenced. Settlements were made with the raiyats, and leases for thirty years were given. Land was classified in a rather artificial manner according to the depth and type of soil and the revenue fixed for the district was then apportioned to the individual fields arithmetically, on the basis of area and class. The weaknesses of this system were that it prescribed no principle for the fixation of the district revenue and that the classification of the fields necessarily had to be done by subordinates who were often dishonest. The assessment was, nevertheless, moderate and its most serious defect was that it ignored the claim of the many mirasdars, who were by custom entitled to hold their land permanently at a fixed revenue. Henceforth they became thirty-year leaseholders.

The more liberal principles adopted by Bird and Wingate ultimately found favour with the authorities, and in one of their last despatches the Court of Directors laid down in 1856 that ‘the right of Government is not a rent which consists of all the surplus produce . . . but a land revenue only’. In the previous year Lord Dalhousie had laid down that in Northern India the government demand should be limited to half of the average net assets. ‘There is little doubt,’ said Lord Dalhousie, ‘that two thirds is a larger proportion of the real average assets than can ordinarily be paid by proprietors or communities in a long course of years.’ Dalhousie’s salutary rule was not always strictly observed, for Provincial Governments tended to take into consideration not only existing but also potential assets. This practice was stopped, at least in Northern India, in 1887. In 1864 the Secretary of State declared that the revenue was not to exceed half the rent, or in the case of raiyatwari settlements half the net produce of the field. Much discussion occurred in the middle of the century as to whether the revenue should be fixed permanently in terms of cash or permanently in terms of grain, or not made permanent at all. No definite principle was laid down, and when a fresh settlement was undertaken in Bombay in 1866 revenue was screwed up dangerously high. Indeed, according to Sir Auckland Colvin who subsequently presided over a committee into the matter, ‘the excessive enhancement of the revised settlement was one of the causes of the agrarian riots of 1875 in the Bombay Presidency’. It appears from the report that too wide a discretion was left to the settlement officers to increase revenue and that this discretion was harshly used. No immediate remedial action was taken, but the strictures passed by Sir Auckland had their effect on the new settlement which was still unfinished at the end of the century. Between 1866 and 1899 settlement revision increased the assessment by 30 per cent—a figure which cannot be regarded as excessive in view of the general change in price levels. Nevertheless the serious Bombay famine at the end of the century led the Government to revise the revenue in certain areas.

It is not possible here to pursue this fascinating subject further, or to examine the revenue settlements in other provinces. Of recent years great increases in prices have so strengthened the position of the cultivator that it is easy to forget how unhappy his lot was in many parts of India in the early days of British rule. Ignorance of economic conditions and local customs—together with the general tendency of revenue authorities in all countries and at all times to think that an increase in yield will be counted for righteousness to them—led in the first decade of British rule to harsh and inequitable assessments and seriously affected the economic condition of the country. Gradually, however, mistakes were rectified and a more liberal spirit introduced; while in the second half of the century in most provinces rising prices considerably helped the agriculturist and reduced his real rent or revenue. Even when increased prices were a ground for an increase in rent or revenue, there was always a time lag and the increase was seldom commensurate with the rise in prices.

Perhaps the most serious defect of British revenue administration was the destruction of the natural aristocracy—the disappearance of influential intermediaries between the Government and the people and the debilitation of the village communities. The wisest of the British administrators in the early nineteenth century were genuinely anxious to preserve indigenous institutions and in particular attached importance to the village communities. Nevertheless the preconceptions of the average British official compelled him to seek to fix the responsibility for the payment of revenue on individuals and not on communities. Even the sagacious Elphinstone, though prepared to let the patel or village headman be the farmer of the village revenue, considered it necessary to fix the rights and liabilities of each raiyat. R. C. Dutt justly asks ‘If the village Patil and the village Council were to be deprived by the proposed Survey of all their power of distributing the collective village assessment among the cultivators forming the village, what was the good of keeping up the Patil and his Council at all? If the functions which they had discharged in past centuries of assessing the Ryots of the village in order to make up the collective State demand was to be taken away from them, where was the necessity of maintaining them only as farmers of revenue?’

The truth perhaps is, as suggested earlier, that whenever government in India has been strong the village communities have tended to lose their importance. Elphinstone himself, in his famous report on the territories conquered from the Peshwa, stated that ‘these Communities contain in miniature all the materials of a State within themselves, and are almost sufficient to protect their members, if all other governments are withdrawn. Though probably not compatible with a very good form of government, they are an excellent remedy for the imperfections of a bad one; they prevent the bad effects of its negligence and weakness, and even present some barrier against its tyranny and rapacity’. Elphinstone and his contemporaries were determined that the English Government should be a ‘very good form of government’—and, with that, the strength of the village communities was perhaps not compatible.

The same centralising tendency encouraged settlement officers to disregard intermediaries wherever possible, and thus important elements in the life of India, such as the mirasdars, began to disappear. In Bengal the Permanent Settlement might be supposed to have saved the old aristocracy; but the rigours of the sunset law in the first few decades ruined many of them, and their successors were not always the true leaders of the people.

It must, indeed, be admitted that in spite of their many administrative successes the British failed to conserve what was good in indigenous institutions or to maintain in being an influential native aristocracy. This, rather than the harshness of the early settlements, was perhaps the most serious error of British revenue policy.

Chapter XLII

The Economic Policy of the Company

In an earlier chapter we have seen how the oppressive conduct of the East India Company’s servants in the early days and the narrow economic policy of the Company between Plassey and the time when it ‘stood forth as Diwan’ had done considerable harm to the indigenous industry of Bengal. Wiser policies, however, soon prevailed. Before long attempts were made to develop industry: firstly, by improvements in technical processes, secondly, by the development of a sound banking system; and, thirdly, by the abolition of internal transit dues.

In the years immediately after Plassey the Company’s approach to indigenous industry was unsound, and in a famous letter, written on 17th March, 1769, the Court of Directors ‘recommended every mode of encouragement and, particularly by augmented wages, in order to induce manufacturers of raw silk to quit that branch and take to the winding of raw silk’. Within a few years the unwisdom of this policy had been realised, and as early as 1783 the House of Commons Select Committee in its Ninth Report condemned it as ‘a perfect plan of policy, both of compulsion and encouragement, which must in a very considerable degree operate destructively to the manufactures of Bengal. Its effects must be (so far as it could operate without being eluded) to change the whole face of that industrial country, in order to render it a field of the produce of crude materials subservient to the manufactures of Great Britain’.

Whatever might be the view of manufacturers in England, it was obviously bad business for an exporting company to depress indigenous industry, particularly when the balance of payments situation was such that the Company had to export even if some of the commodities exported were not profitable. Attempts were therefore soon made to improve the quality of Bengal products, both of raw material and of manufactured goods, though not unnaturally the former was regarded as more important. The first commodity to receive attention was raw silk, and on this point it is worth quoting J. C. Sinha, who has treated this subject with his usual objectivity. ‘As early as 1757 the Court of Directors sent Mr. Richard Wilder to Kasimbazar to remedy the defects of Bengal silk. He continued to work until his death in 1761 and introduced certain improvements in silk winding. The next important measure was the import of silk worms from China in 1771 to improve the quality of the silk cocoons. During the years 1770–1775 the Company adopted the Italian method of winding silk. This led to such an improvement in the quality of Bengal silk that its sale in England increased rapidly. The average annual export of raw silk to England during the decade 1776–1785 rose to 560,283 (small) lbs. while that from Italy, China and other countries did not altogether exceed 282,304 lbs. Unfortunately this improvement in the quality synchronised with a rise in the cost of production.’ By 1783, indeed, Bengal silk was more expensive than Italian silk, and for a time the Company lost on its export business.

About the same time considerable encouragement was given by the Company to the indigo industry. Bengal indigo had always been regarded as inferior and the small quantities of this dye exported early in the eighteenth century came not from Bengal but from Upper India. The export was then unprofitable and was discontinued but the decline of indigo cultivation in the West Indies and the cessation of American supplies during the war of independence again suggested that the export of indigo might be profitable. A number of private Englishmen, therefore, started indigo cultivation in Bengal on a big scale and sold their produce to the East India Company. Prinsep, a resident of Calcutta, seems to have been the pioneer, for his contract to sell indigo to the Company at favourable prices led other Europeans to take to indigo cultivation, with similar contracts. The Company lost heavily on these transactions, but Bengal became a leading exporter of indigo, and in 1810 five-sixths of the indigo imported into Britain came from Bengal. The indigo planters acquired an unsavoury reputation for harsh and sometimes dishonest treatment of the growers—though that great Indian patriot, Raja Rammohan Roy, did not fully support the general complaint against them—but at least they established in Bengal a great new export industry.

The practical Warren Hastings next made it his business to encourage the weaving of cotton cloth. He abolished the existing monopolistic practices of the Company and directed that ‘we shall receive proposals from all native merchants, who may be willing to contract with the Company for any quantity of goods . . . of proper assortments for an investment and to give satisfactory security for the performance of their engagements . . . that we shall receive for ready money whatever goods of proper assortment may be tended upon suitable terms’. In practice, however, the Company more frequently purchased through European agents than by direct contract with Indian merchants. These agents had a direct interest in the development of local industry and were often prepared to put their own capital into local enterprises. The earlier tendency to discourage manufactures had thus been reversed.

At this stage the conflict between the Company and the manufacturers of piece goods in England again became important. The Directors were indeed alarmed by the rapidly improving techniques of manufacture of muslins in England, and in 1783 they wrote to their Bengal representative as follows: ‘We transmit to you by this conveyance three small boxes containing musters of some muslins, the produce of a manufacture that has lately been set up at Manchester. . . . The great degree of perfection at which this manufacture is already arrived, although at present only in its infant state, the prices which are 20 per cent under our own . . . cannot but alarm us for so important a branch of our commerce. We doubt not therefore but you will also exert yourself to the utmost in causing the manufacturers of Bengal to pay every attention not only to an improvement in the fabric of muslins but also to a reduction of the prices, as on both the one and the other will depend very much our future success in this article.’ Five years later the Directors feared that, with their newly developed skill, English manufacturers using cotton from Surat would be able to undersell Indian piece goods in the British market. New attempts were made by the Company to improve the quality of Bengal produce for export purposes and experts were sent out to India to assist. There was, however, nothing in India corresponding to the vast stock of technical and industrial skill so characteristic of England at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and it soon became clear that Indian manufactured products could not compete with those of England in any market, including India. British tariff policy—to which we shall return later—was unfavourable to India, but the fundamental fact was that Britain was learning to manufacture well and cheaply while India was falling rapidly behind. The decline in quality of Indian manufactures had begun in the anarchy of the eighteenth century and was accelerated, first by the economic monetary disorders before Plassey and then by the oppression of the Company’s servants in the early days. In the next stage the Company’s anxiety to secure the ‘investment’, however, gave a fillip to industry and at the same time new markets were opening in other parts of the world, but it was too late to arrest the decline. It is remarkable that wealthy Indians of this period made no serious attempt either to capture these new markets or to acquire the industrial and technical skills which were developing so rapidly in Britain and elsewhere. They seem, indeed, to have been in a curious state of mental and commercial lethargy which cannot be set down solely as the result of foreign conquest, since much of India was still independent.

It may more reasonably be attributed to the long-drawn anarchy of the eighteenth century and perhaps also to the fact that, as has been seen earlier, Mughal policy had made it practically impossible for substantial capitalist classes to emerge. Whatever the cause may have been, the fact is that at the end of the eighteenth century, and indeed for long after, industrial and commercial development in India was left almost entirely in British hands. The profits earned were naturally remitted to England so that India did not benefit as fully by the growth of industry as if Indian capitalists themselves had come forward to start new ventures. Indian producers, nevertheless, benefited considerably from the stimulus to production provided by the activities of the East India Company in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Another act intended to stimulate trade was the abolition, after much hesitation and delay, of the internal transit duties. While the Mughal power was strong the points at which such tolls were levied were few and far between, but in the eighteenth century they became so multiplied that an article of commerce might well have to pay duty ten or more times in transit from the producer to the purchaser. The English inherited this system and turned it unfairly to their own account, but by 1771 the Home authorities had realised the harm done to commerce by this multi-point tax. Under the instructions of the Court of Directors, in 1773 Hastings reduced the number of customs points to five and directed that ‘a rowannah passed in any one of the customs houses should be current throughout the province and being endorsed by the Collector the goods shall pass without interruption or further examination’. In other words, as far as the Company’s dues were concerned, the import system had become a one-point tax. Zemindars were still allowed to levy tolls in their market places and in practice they continued to levy them throughout their estates even though the penalty for a breach of the regulations was confiscation of the whole or part of the estate. Hastings’ measure, in fact, did little to improve matters. Cornwallis went a step further and abolished the five inland customs houses—replacing them by one such post at Manjee. He also prohibited zemindars from levying tolls anywhere at all. This prohibition was limited to the permanently settled areas of Bengal, and, moreover, town duties were not abolished. Goods from many districts thus still ran the gauntlet of numerous customs points. In 1835 Lord Ellenborough, seven years before he became Governor-General, wrote forcibly of the evils of this system: ‘No less than 235 separate articles are subjected to Inland Duties. The tariff includes almost everything of personal or domestic use, and its operation, combined with the system of search, is of the most vexatious and offensive character, without materially benefiting the revenue. The power of search, if really exercised by every Custom-house officer, would put a stop to internal trade by the delay it would necessarily occasion. It is not exercised except for the purpose of extortion. . . . The effect upon the national morals is yet more serious than the effect upon national wealth. Every merchant, every manufacturer and every traveller is, as it were, compelled, for the security of his property or the protection of his personal comfort, and not unfrequently for that of the feelings of the females of his family, to enter into unlawful collusion with the officers of Government. It is a system which demoralises our own people, and which appears to excite the aversion of all the foreign traders of Asia.’ These inland duties had already been the subject of considerable discussion and only revenue considerations had prevented their early abolition. Lord Ellenborough’s memorandum rapidly produced results and all internal duties were abolished in the various provinces at dates between 1836 and 1844. The sacrifice of revenue involved in this reform was small, and it is to be regretted that it was not effected earlier.

An equally important aspect of the economic policy of the Company was the attempt to reorganise the Indian banking system. This will be discussed in detail in a later chapter and it is only necessary here to state that it is one of the many influences which stimulated Indian trade and industry at the end of the eighteenth century. There can be little doubt that at that time, in spite of the unwisdom and oppression which had characterised the first decade or so after Plassey, the economic effects of the Company’s rule had on balance been beneficial to India.

Other influences, however, now began to make themselves felt. The French wars for a time cut off important markets, and when peace was restored the Industrial Revolution had transformed Britain into a great industrial country far ahead of all competitors. English goods of high quality and remarkable cheapness now began to pour into India and to drive Indian producers out of business. It is here necessary to examine this process and consider how far it was facilitated by British tariff policy.

During the seventeenth century the operations of the various European companies in India led to a great increase in the volume of exports. In the first phase, indigo was the most important commodity exported, but by about 1620 it had been discovered that there was a considerable market for calicos in Western Europe. The East India Company devoted much attention to the development of this trade in piece goods; Dacca muslins soon became popular in England and the wearing of Indian calicos and prints became fashionable. Soon after this period manufacturers in England began to develop the art of cloth printing, and, as a means of protecting their interests, in 1700 the use of Indian printed and dyed calicoes in England was prohibited, though they might be imported for the purposes of re-export. At the same time an ad valorem duty of 15 per cent was levied on all muslins and unprinted calicos imported into England. This duty was not heavy enough to be protective, and in fact the importation of white calicoes increased considerably in the next few years. They began to be printed in England, but according to Townsend Warner they were resented as displacing English-made woollens and ‘the rioters threw aqua fortis at the wearers of them’. In 1720 their import was prohibited, for protection of English weavers was a cardinal principle of British policy at this time.

This exclusion from the English home market did not seriously affect exporters from India. In the first place, Britain was by no means the most important market for such goods in the eighteenth century—indeed at the end of the century the quantities taken by America and Portugal were respectively six and four times those imported into Britain. Secondly, India’s piece goods began to be exported through England to European countries on an increasing scale. At the beginning of the nineteenth century some of India’s best customers began to develop their own piece-goods industries, and, although the export trade ceased to be a monopoly of the Company in 1813, it declined rapidly. According to R. C. Dutt, ‘the export to America declined from 13,633 bales in 1801 to 258 bales in 1829; Denmark, which took 1,457 bales in 1800, never took more than 150 bales after 1820; Portugal, which took 9,714 bales in 1799, never took over a thousand bales after 1825; and the exports to the Arabian and Persian Gulfs, which rose to between four and seven thousand bales between 1810 and 1820, never exceeded two thousand after 1825’. Early in the nineteenth century substantial reductions were made in the British import duties on Indian piece goods—the duty on muslin was reduced from 27⅓ per cent to 10 per cent and that on calicoes from 71⅔ per cent to 10 per cent. These reductions to a level too low to be protective did not avail to help Indian exports, and by 1830 Indian exports of cotton goods to Britain had dwindled to a negligible figure. The simple fact was that in the new conditions of the textile world Indian cloth goods had ceased to be competitive.

The story of India’s silk goods is not dissimilar from that of cotton goods. A heavy protective duty on silk goods imported for use in England (which at one period was hardened into prohibition) was offset by substantial re-exports to other countries. According to evidence given to a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1840 (quoted by R. C. Dutt) figures of imports of unprinted Indian silk goods into Britain were as follows:

Year	For Home Consumption	For Re-export
1838	16,000 pieces	310,000 pieces
1839	38,000 pieces	352,000 pieces

Another witness before the same committee showed how exports of silk goods from Britain to France had come to consist increasingly less of British manufactures and more of goods imported from India, Frenchmen clearly preferred the Indian products; and whereas British silk goods imported into France in 1839 amounted only to £5,500 in value, Indian goods similarly imported through Britain amounted to £168,500. No similar preference existed in England, except perhaps in regard to Indian silk handkerchiefs, and by the middle of the century the import of Indian silk goods to Britain had dwindled rapidly.

It is not possible here to study the export of other Indian commodities, but it may be stated as a general principle that during the period of the Company’s rule, England was not prepared to let India’s products undersell her manufactured goods in England. This fact has been distorted by some writers, both English and Indian, into an alleged desire on the part of Britain to destroy Indian overseas trade. Except for the first two decades after Plassey, there is no evidence whatsoever that either the British Government or the East India Company had any such intention—and this fact is willingly acknowledged by J. C. Sinha, a leading authority in this field. Nor do the facts support the belief that the British protective duties killed Indian industry; though it may be true that without such protection British industry would itself have been damaged by cheaper Indian production, before the Industrial Revolution was at its height.

Far more serious to India than the British policy of protection was the determined maintenance by the British Government of a policy of something approximating to free trade for India. At a time when Indian silk goods imported into Britain paid a duty of 20 per cent British silk goods imported into India paid only 3½ per cent. In the case of woollen goods the disparity was even greater—the duties in 1831 being 30 per cent and 2 per cent respectively. As a result of this policy an industrially and commercially backward India had to compete with the vast resources of technical skill of Britain, which was then the most advanced industrial country in the world. British goods naturally poured into India, where they could be sold more cheaply than the Indian manufactures to which they were also generally superior. Inevitably many Indian producers were driven out of business and great hardship resulted.

In view of the importance of this matter it seems desirable to quote some contemporary evidence. R. M. Martin, writing in 1832, asserts that by the increase of the export of cotton goods to India from Britain ‘many million of Indo-British subjects have been totally ruined in their trade, and forced to seek a subsistence by any labour, however coarse or ill-remunerated, that presented itself, while thousands of men and women have perished of want’.

The next witness is Sir Charles Trevelyan, a Treasury official who served in India under Lord Bentinck and at a later stage became Finance Member of the Government of India. In his evidence to the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1840 he stated that Indian cotton manufacturers had been driven out of business by English goods and that ‘the peculiar kind of silky cotton formerly grown in Bengal, from which the fine Dacca muslins used to be made, was hardly ever seen; the population of the town of Dacca has fallen from 150,000 to 30,000 or 40,000 and the jungle and malaria are fast encroaching upon the town. The only cotton manufactures which stand their ground in India are of the very coarse kind and English cotton manufactures are generally consumed by all above the very poorest throughout India. . . . Dacca, which was the Manchester of India, has fallen off from a very flourishing town to a very poor and small one; the distress there has been very great indeed’.

Bishop Heber in his Indian Journal corroborates Trevelyan’s statement regarding Dacca. ‘Its trade is reduced to the sixtieth part of what it was, and all its splendid buildings, the castle of its founder and Shahjehanguire, and the noble mosque he built, the palaces of the ancient Nawabs, the factories and Churches of the French, Dutch and Portuguese nations are all sunk into ruin, and overgrown with jungle.’ Of Surat, Bishop Heber says: ‘The trade of Surat is now of very trifling consequence, consisting of little but raw cotton, which is shipped in boats for Bombay. All the manufactured goods of the country are undersold by the English, except kinkobs and shawls, for which there is very little demand; a dismal decay has consequently taken place in the circumstances of the native merchants; and an instance fell under my knowledge, in which a Mussulman family, formerly of great wealth and magnificence, were endeavouring to dispose of their library, a very valuable one, for subsistence. There is a small congregation of Armenians (the principal merchants of the East) in a state of decay and general poverty.’

Chaplin, in his evidence to the House of Lords Committee quoted by Martin, says: ‘They use the manufactures of England because they have been latterly much cheaper. Many manufacturers have been compelled to resort to agriculture for a maintenance, a department which is already overstocked.’

One further quotation may conveniently be taken from R. M. Martin’s book, though he, in his turn, extracted it from the Minutes of the House of Commons. It consists of a petition by some wealthy inhabitants of Bengal dealing mainly with the proposals that Englishmen should be encouraged to colonise India. In one passage they state ‘that the Petitioners, and more especially the labouring and manufacturing classes of natives, are already suffering grievous hardships in consequence on those principles in trade and commerce which the Petitioners are told are now actuating the English councils, not being extended to the produce of that country, while every encouragement is held out to the exportation from England to that country of the growth and produce of foreign as well as English industry, while many thousands of the natives of that country, who a short time ago derived a livelihood from the growth of cotton and the manufacture of cotton goods, are without bread in consequence of the facilities afforded to the produce of America and the manufacturing industry of England; and the article of sugar, to the production of which the lands of the Petitioners might be turned is loaded with such heavy duties in England as effectually to shut the market against the industry of the East-Indians when turned to this particular commodity’.

It is not necessary to labour this point further, for it is clear that Britain’s refusal during the days of the Company to levy protective duties on imports into India resulted in the flooding of India with machine-made goods from England and that this caused considerable distress to the weavers and certain other producers. On the other hand, the avidity with which, in the nineteenth century, all but the poorest Indians bought British goods in preference to dearer and often inferior Indian commodities, suggests that the policy was at least beneficial to the Indian consumer. How the interests of the consumer should be balanced against those of the producer, or at what stage, if any, of economic development, protection is desirable, are controversial questions beyond our scope. It must, in any case, be recognised that free trade was imposed on India under the Company’s rule not in the interests of India but for the sake of the British manufacturer and that the Indian producer suffered in consequence.

We cannot conclude this chapter without reference to that mysterious subject of ‘the drain’. Many writers have tended to oversimplify this subject and some have suggested that the excess of exports over imports during this period is in itself a measure of the ‘tribute’ paid by India to Britain. Sir Theodore Morrison in his book The Economic Transition of India has ably demonstrated the fallacy underlying this approach and has pointed out that in the first decade of this century the U.S.A., Australia, Brazil, South Africa and other highly prosperous countries have had a similar excess of exports. Such an excess may indeed be a characteristic of a developing economy—and this will be a factor of importance when we consider the economic position of India under the Crown. During the Company period, however, this factor need not bother us and it has only been mentioned to show that ‘the drain’ cannot be analysed as simply as some writers have sought to do.

As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the genesis of ‘the drain’ is to be found mainly in the application of the territorial revenues of the Company to the provision of their investment. In other words, surplus revenue was used for the purchase of goods for export to England. India thus obtained neither goods nor bullion nor services in return for them. This system was brought to an end in 1813, when the territorial and commercial revenues of the Company were separated. Henceforth the territorial revenues were to be applied to the cost of civil and military administration, the cost of the Commercial Establishment and payment of interest on the Indian debt. Dividends were to be paid out of commercial profits, and except for the relatively small sum involved in the cost of the Commercial Establishment the trading side of the Company’s activities was completely divorced from any connection with the revenue of the country. From this time onwards no drain could arise except perhaps through the Home Charges. It is, therefore, worth recording what the extent of ‘the drain’ may have been up to 1813. For the period up to 1780 we have accepted a figure of £30,000,000 sterling as the total drain. For the period between 1780 and 1813 the investment averaged about £1,300,000 annually. It was, however, not wholly financed out of surplus revenues, and, moreover, there were certain private investments from abroad which reduced the balance of payments. The writer hopes to investigate this subject more fully in another book, but it will perhaps not be far out if we assess the drain between 1780 and 1813 at another £30,000,000 sterling, making a total of £60,000,000 for the whole period of the Company rule until the separation of territorial revenues.

The Home Charges included payments on account of debts and other items of expenditure incurred in England on account of India. In 1813 the Indian debt stood at £15,000,000 sterling. It is clear that one element of this debt, arising out of the Company’s investment, represented a drain, but account of this has already been taken in the preceding calculations. Expenditure during the remainder of the Company’s rule fluctuated considerably in accordance with the foreign policy and defence problems of the time. The Maratha and Burma wars both led to deficits, but Lord Bentinck’s careful administration again produced a surplus. The militant policy of Lord Auckland soon converted that into a deficit and the Sikh wars still further increased expenditure. Nevertheless, if we take the period from 1813 to 1858, we find that revenue exceeded expenditure in India by £30,000,000 sterling.

The margin, however, was not always sufficient to pay for the Home Charges and the debt therefore increased steadily. In 1834 it was substantially increased by an important administrative change. In the previous year the Act renewing the Company’s charter had provided that it should ‘discontinue and abstain from all commercial business’ and at the same time had laid down that a yearly dividend of 10½ per cent should be paid out of the revenues of India to the Company’s stockholders. These dividends on the £12,000,000, together with the existing Home Charges, were more than could be met from the revenues of India and by when the Company was brought to an end the total debt had risen to £69,000,000.

There has been much controversy as to whether Britain was justified in charging India with the payment of these dividends, and R. C. Dutt was expressing the general Indian view when he stated that ‘the empire was thus transferred from the Company to the Crown, but the Indian people paid the purchase money’. As against this view it must be remembered that the Company’s capital was raised to build up a trade authorised by the Indian rulers of the day and that the Company’s commercial operations were brought to an end mainly because that course was necessary for the good governance of India. It is at least arguable that it was right for the country which was to benefit by the abrogation of long-standing rights to pay the appropriate compensation.

The nature of the Home Charges may perhaps best be made clear referring to the figures of a particular year, and for this purpose we shall take 1849–50. In that year those charges amounted to £2,435,337 and were made up as follows:

1. Dividends to proprietors of East India Stock: £629,435
2. Interest on the Home Bond debt: £173,723
3. Furlough and retired pay etc. (civil and military): £742,959
4. Payment on account of H.M. troops serving in India: £250,999
5. Expenditure connected with the Home administration of Indian affairs: £505,678
6. Her Majesty’s mission to the Court of Persia: £12,000
7. Expenditure connected with the establishment of steam communications with India: £120,543

  Total: £2,435,337

Of these items, the last will give rise to no controversy in view of its obviously beneficial character. The penultimate item, though it might well be the subject of contention, may be ignored as being small. The remaining items raise a major question of principle. How far was Britain justified in charging India with the entire cost of civil and military administration, including the cost of the wars by which part of India was conquered? Sir George Wingate, at one time a very successful Revenue Commissioner of the Bombay Presidency, discussed this question in detail in a pamphlet entitled Our Financial Relations with India, written just after the Company had been wound up, and his views deserve quotation since they represented the attitude of liberal-minded British officers at that time. Wingate stated his main thesis as follows: ‘The entire cost of the Colonial Office, or in other words, the Home Government of all British Colonies and dependencies except India, as well as of their military and naval defence, is defrayed from the revenues of the United Kingdom; and it seems to be a natural inference that similar charges should be borne by this country in the case of India. But what is the fact? Not a shilling from the revenues of Great Britain has ever been expended on the military defence of our Indian Empire.’ Wingate then drove his point home by reference to the case of Ceylon, which, he said, ‘is properly a part of India, and was acquired in exactly the same manner as our dominions on the continent of India. In Ceylon we have British troops and local corps, as in India, but the cost of both is defrayed by Great Britain, with the aid of a limited contribution from the revenues of the island. What, then, are the reasons for this distinction . . . an answer is only to be found in the accident of the Home administration of Ceylon having been transferred to the Colonial Office, while that of India remained under the East India Company, which was always treated with jealousy and distrust by Parliament and the nation’. Wingate then proceeded to detail and pointed out that not only were His Majesty’s troops serving in India paid by India but that ‘upwards of sixteen thousand men of the garrisons of the United Kingdom, available for any emergency that might occur in this country, are, on the trivial pretence of their belonging to depots of Indian regiments, transferred to the Indian establishment, and paid from the Indian revenues’. Moreover, India was compelled to pay for wars which were but remotely connected with her interests, and here he refers to a letter dated 6th April 1842 in which the Chairman of the East India Company claimed that as regards the Afghan War, which had crippled the finances of India, ‘in no view of the case can it be just or expedient that the whole charge of the operations, including that of the military reinforcements about to be effected, should be thrown on the Government of India’. The claim was in due course rejected.

Wingate’s contention is thus threefold: in the first place, India should not have been treated less generously than the colonies merely because the British possessions there were obtained partly by conquest; secondly, the Home Charges must be regarded as a tribute; and, thirdly, the resulting drain harmed the Indian economy seriously. Insofar as the first of these contentions is a proposition in ethics, it is not easy either to agree or to disagree with it—for the very ethical considerations that underly it might be held to condemn conquest at all, and so become irrelevant to our case. It is perhaps sufficient to agree that India was in fact treated in this matter more harshly than the colonies, and to express the view that in the long run generosity would have paid Britain better.

As regards Wingate’s second contention, it seems necessary to distinguish between the different items that made up the Home Charges. The recovery from India of the cost of her own subjugation may indeed be regarded as the levy of tribute, but to apply that term to the cost of the subsequent administration of India is to deprive words of their proper meaning. It is not possible, therefore, to agree wholly with Wingate in this matter.

On the third point there is no room for controversy; the Home Charges did constitute a drain on India’s resources. It is true that if Britain had not acquired India the people of the country would still have had to pay for the cost of administration but the sums so paid would not have gone out of the country. The effects of these external payments were stated very clearly by Wingate: ‘Taxes spent in the country in which they are raised are totally different in their effect from taxes raised in one country and spent in another. In the former case, the taxes collected from the population at large are paid away to the portion of the population engaged in the service of Government, through whose expenditure they are again returned to the industrious classes. They occasion a different distribution but no loss of national income. . . . But the case is wholly different when the taxes are not spent in the country from which they are raised. In this case they constitute no mere transfer of a portion of the national income from one set of citizens to another, but an absolute loss and extinction of the whole amount withdrawn from the taxed country. As regards its effects on national production, the whole amount might as well be thrown into the sea.’ This economic proposition cannot be gainsaid—a ‘drain’ is the inevitable result of foreign rule. There are, indeed, many items to be set off against this ‘drain’ in the case of India. Her dependence on Britain relieved her of the necessity of developing a modern navy—a process which would have involved very heavy external expenditure over a long period. The same dependence also enabled India to borrow capital for railways and public works, and at a later period for her general commercial development, much more cheaply than she could otherwise have done. Sir Theodore Morrison has made an interesting comparison of the position of India with that of Japan in this respect and has shown that, on an average, India under British rule was able to borrow at a rate of interest 2 per cent less than that which had to be paid by Japan. ‘The gain to India,’ says Sir Theodore, ‘from the British connection may therefore be expressed as a reduction of 2 per cent in the rate at which she has borrowed capital. An additional 2 per cent upon India’s total debt of £267,000,000 would represent an additional charge of £5,340,000 a year. This in itself is not very far from being enough to wipe out the whole of the “political drain”.’ And Sir Theodore, writing in 1911, goes on to argue that this advantage will increase as India develops further. The present writer considers that there are fallacies in this argument and he does not consider it possible to work out a plus and minus account of this kind. He prefers to leave the subject with the general statement that financial advantages as well as disadvantages have accrued to India from the British connection and to recognise that ‘the drain’ was one of the disadvantages.

Chapter XLIII

Irrigation

In any study of the economic impact of Britain on India considerable attention must be given to the remarkable British achievement in irrigation and agriculture. In a country characterised by great climatic variations between different zones—a country which includes the almost rainless deserts of Sindh as well as Cherrapunji, the wettest place in the world—irrigation must necessarily become important at an early stage of development. In India this importance is enhanced by the facts that, except in the south, the rainfall is concentrated in four months of the year and that failure of rainfall is not infrequent. Such failure, moreover, is most frequent in areas where the normal rainfall is low, and all those parts of India where the average annual rainfall is less than fifty inches are therefore officially regarded as forming a precarious area. In that area, according to official statistics, rainfall is likely to be deficient to the extent of 25 per cent in one year out of five, while in one year out of ten a 40 per cent deficiency may be expected. This latter deficiency would constitute severe drought, and its comparatively frequent recurrence justifies us in regarding the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, much of the United Provinces and Bihar, besides most of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, as precarious.

From time immemorial the rulers and landholders of that area have been concerned with the problem of irrigation. Before the British period it was tackled mainly by means of village wells and by artificial lakes or ‘tanks’, and even to this day the construction of a tank is a sure means of acquiring a reputation as a local benefactor. There are said to be forty thousand such tanks in the Madras Presidency and fifty thousand in the United Provinces. Large-scale works, though comparatively rare in earlier days, were not unknown. Kautilya, whose work on statecraft has been quoted earlier in this book, recognised the importance of irrigation when he wrote ‘the results of a good shower of rain are ever attained in the case of crops below irrigational works’. His royal master, Chandragupta, maintained an irrigation department which was responsible for the proper regulation of the sluices, and regular water rates were levied. Chandragupta’s brother-in-law, Pushyagupta, dammed up a small stream at Girnar in the remote western provinces and formed a reservoir called ‘Sudarsana’ or ‘the Beautiful’ and in the next reign irrigation channels from it were constructed. For four hundred years they remained in working order, but in A.D. 150 the embankment was destroyed in a great storm. The local Viceroy rebuilt the dam ‘three times stronger’ than before, but once again it was destroyed and all traces of the reservoir itself disappeared.

At a later date, the Rajput chiefs devoted much energy and money to irrigation works and we are told by Havell that Bhoja of Malwa ‘added to his fame as the patron of art and letters by the great artificial lake of Bholpur, 250 square miles in extent, created by throwing banks of solid masonry across the watershed of a circle of hills’. In the ninth century the celebrated King of Kashmir, Avantivarman, regulated the course of the River Vitasta, shifted its confluence with the River Sindhu and thus brought considerable new areas of previously flooded land under cultivation. Schemes for the comfort or delectation of a great man have often had as by-products convenience for the public. In modern times the visits of a Viceroy to an outlying district have often meant that money for the improvement of local roads, for which the District Officer had perhaps long been clamouring, suddenly became available. Similarly, in earlier days, the desire of an emperor for the luxury of running water sometimes led to the construction of great aqueducts, which, incidentally, would benefit the cultivators in the fortunate areas. Indeed, according to the Triennial Review of Irrigation in India²² for the period 1918–21, such was the origin of the great Jumna Canal. ‘The first record of an irrigation project in the Jumna Valley is that of a canal, built by Feroz Shah about the middle of the fourteenth century, with its terminus at Hissar . . . As the main object of the work was to convey water to the Emperor’s hunting lodge at Hissar rather than to irrigate the intermediate country advantage was taken, in fixing the alignment, of any natural hollow or channel whose slope and direction were found suitable and the resulting work consequently took the form of a series of linked drainages rather than of a canal, as the word is understood today.’ About 1568 the channel, which had fallen into disuse, was renovated by Akbar, the object being in this case the irrigation of a district, which the emperor was bestowing upon his son, Muhammad Salim. ‘God has said, from water all things are made. I consequently ordain that this jungle, in which subsistence is obtained with thirst, be converted into a place of comfort.’ The comfort was short-lived, for the channel silted up, and in the next century a further re-excavation had to be undertaken. The alignment was, however, essentially unsatisfactory for irrigation and the canal again became choked up, well before the British period.

Bengal, the first extensive territorial possession of the British in India, presented them with no serious irrigation problems. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the acquisition of fresh territories in the Madras Presidency at once called attention to the need for scientific irrigation, while the importance of the subject was still further emphasised when the company extended its authority to the United Provinces and the Punjab. From this time onwards British irrigation administration falls into five phases.

In the first phase, the available resources of money and manpower were concentrated on the scientific reconstruction of ancient works, the first to receive attention being the Grand Anicut on the River Cauvery. The problem of the Cauvery arose from the fact that it was divided by the island of Srirangam into two channels, of which the Cauvery proper was at a higher level than the other or Coleroon channel. To keep the higher channel in stable existence, at a somewhat uncertain date, perhaps in the second century A.D., a huge masonry anicut was constructed between the island and the left bank. For centuries this anicut achieved its purpose, but gradually the Cauvery began to silt up. The first great British irrigation work in India was the construction in 1836 by Sir Arthur Cotton of a new anicut which diverted a large volume into the Cauvery and away from the Coleroon. After a few years of experiment and detailed reconstruction, the new work proved successful. The Cauvery was saved from further deterioration and by means of an elaborate system of sluices and channels the area irrigated by it was gradually increased. By 1918 the system irrigated over a million acres, included three thousand five hundred miles of canals and distributors, and was paying 17 per cent on the capital expended.

In this phase the work of remodelling the two other ancient works, the West Jumna Canal and the East Jumna Canal, was also undertaken. It is not possible to discuss these operations in detail here, but the difficulties of these early days, when funds and experience were alike limited, may well be illustrated by an extract from the Triennial Review previously quoted. ‘In 1821 a small instalment of the waters of the Jumna was again diverted into the Delhi canal by Lieutenant Blane of the Engineers, but the experiment was mistrusted both by Government and by the population of the tract affected, funds were severely restricted and the original alignment was consequently adhered to for reasons of economy, natural channels continuing to be utilised as far as possible and depressions being crossed on earthen banks with no adequate provision for the intercepted drainage. Swamps, as was to be expected, formed upstream of the canal, while the occasional collapse of the banks resulted in widespread injury to the villages and crops in the vicinity. The famine of 1832–33 led to the enlargement and multiplication of the irrigating channels, but these were executed in haste upon imperfect information and on bad alignments. Altogether the early history of the Western Jumna Canal is one of dearly bought lessons in hydraulic engineering. No check was put on over-irrigation and between this fact and the faulty design of the canal itself large portions of the commanded tract became waterlogged. Saline efflorescence made its appearance and there were yearly epidemics of malaria.’

Sufficient experience had now been gained for British engineers to embark on the construction of entirely new irrigation works on a large scale. This second phase, which began about 1840, witnessed the construction of three great systems—the Ganges Canal, the Upper Bari Doab Canal and the Godavari delta system—and is regarded as the classic period of irrigation in India. To a layman, the Ganges Canal must ever appear one of the most remarkable of engineering feats. In its early reaches it runs through hilly country, cuts right across the natural lines of flow and crosses four large and tumultuous rivers. Three of these currents are carried across the canal on what are known as super-passages, while the canal itself is carried over the fourth river on a great aqueduct. This aqueduct can only adequately be described by an engineer, and we therefore quote again from the Triennial Review of 1918–21: ‘At the nineteenth mile comes the Solani aqueduct, which is indubitably the finest work on the canal. The aqueduct proper consists of fifteen arches, each of fifty feet span, supported on massive masonry piers, which carry the canal over the Solani river, the waterway provided for the canal being ten feet deep and one hundred and sixty-four feet in clear width, excluding the wall in the centre which divides the channel into two bays and the roads on either side. The up and down stream continuations of the aqueduct take the form of an enormous earthen embankment across the valley of the Solani over two and a quarter miles long and thirty-six feet high from the ground to the canal roadway. The sides of the canal are revetted with masonry throughout the length of the embankment and for some distance below it, giving a total revetment of over three miles. Even when viewed in the light of modern development, the Solani aqueduct and its approaches must still be accounted as one of the most magnificent irrigation works over constructed.’ The engineer responsible for this great work was Colonel Sir Proby Thomas Cautley, of the Bengal Artillery. The most important technical advance in this period was in the Godavari delta system where permanent headworks were constructed for the first time in India—in all earlier projects, if we except the diversion of the Cauvery, temporary headworks had been built annually, in view of the difficulty of constructing permanent dams which would stand the force of the rivers in full spate.

The third phase was one in which certain major irrigation projects were handed over to commercial enterprise for execution, with unfortunate results. At the height of his fame Sir Arthur Cotton put forward proposals for a new irrigation system on an unprecedented scale, which would, he claimed, irrigate one hundred and fifty thousand square miles of country from Madras in the east to Poona in the west.

At that time such works were not financed by loan, but were charged to revenue. Alarmed by the magnitude of the sum required, the Government decided to put the scheme into the hands of a commercial concern to which they would guarantee a return of 5 per cent—a practice which was to become familiar in the case of railway construction. The Madras Irrigation Company was accordingly formed in 1863 with a capital of £1,000,000 to undertake the Tungabhadra portion of the great network of proposed canals. The scheme appears to have been unsound both in its conception and in its execution. The main weir was wrongly sited, no proper check was kept on the work done, and the cost far exceeded the estimate. The result was that the company soon found itself losing money on a considerable scale, and ultimately the Government had to buy up the company and in addition to accept a loss of one and half million pounds. The official finding was that ‘a better canal could have been built for half the money’. Apart from inefficient execution, for which the company must bear the blame, the scheme was wholly misconceived. In much of the area concerned irrigation was scarcely required and cultivators who could raise quite fair crops in any case were not prepared to pay for it. The truth seems to be that the engineering and commercial success of the early irrigation projects had been so remarkable as to destroy the critical faculties of those concerned.

A second company known as the East India Irrigation and Canal Company was formed in 1858 and undertook four connected schemes in Orissa and the south-west of Bengal, including both navigable canals and irrigation projects. In this case no return was guaranteed to the company, and the Government even went so far as to warn the Directors against being over-sanguine. The project proved much more expensive than had been estimated. In due course the company failed, and, in spite of its warning, the Government had to come to the rescue. Here, too, little allowance was made for the fact that, in the areas concerned, cultivators might not be willing to pay for irrigation. This has in fact proved to be the case, and the system has never paid. Much useful work was nevertheless done before the company failed, and Mr. D. G. Harris, the author of Irrigation in India, comments as follows: ‘It is however only fair to say that in spite of the enormous outlay upon them the Orissa canals have at least in one respect justified their existence. Before their construction Orissa, shut in between pathless jungles and impracticable seas, and alternately visited by floods and droughts, was always liable to terrible visitations of famine. The great famine of 1865–6, for example, which occurred before the canals were sufficiently far advanced to give relief, cost the lives of a million people and the Government £1½ million to save the remainder. Prior to the works, the whole Province depended upon one crop in the year: if this failed from excess or deficiency of moisture there was nothing but starvation before the people. Now there is a large extent of land commanded by the canals upon which one crop can be saved or another raised in its stead, while a still larger area is protected from floods by embankments constructed in connection with the system. The navigable canals, moreover, provide a means for the transportation of produce to regions of dearth. From a purely protective point of view therefore the works are of the greatest value.’

After the financial failure of these two projects and two others similarly treated, the Government abandoned the idea of having its major irrigation works carried out by private enterprise. In 1867 it was for the first time agreed in principle that productive works should be financed by public loans, and this new policy, together with the valuable lesson learnt from the irrigation companies’ experiences, made great developments in irrigation possible. In the next twenty years five major projects and a number of minor works of irrigation were undertaken.

The first of these major projects, the Sirhind Canal in the Punjab, is especially interesting for two reasons. In the first place, it served not only British India but the three states of Patiala, Jhind and Nabha and princely co-operation had to be secured; and, secondly, the shortage of local labour was overcome by the use of convict labour from jails especially established for the purpose. The second major project of this period, the Lower Ganges Canal, formed with the Upper Ganges Canal one of the largest single irrigation systems in the world, with a length of channels of 7,650 miles irrigating an area of nearly two and a half million acres. Another specially interesting project undertaken at this period was the Swat Canal in the Yusafzai valley, west of Peshawar. It was undertaken principally with the object of pacifying the Muslims and the other frontier tribes and inducing them to settle on British territory. The Triennial Review, which has been quoted so often, rightly says that it would be difficult to picture a more forbidding country in which to carry out such a work. ‘The average rainfall was only fourteen inches, and liable to fall to half this amount in a year of drought. It was barren, treeless and almost uninhabited, while about it lay an inhospitable land peopled mainly by predatory marauders. Military guards had to be employed for the protection of all working parties, and every engineer’s bungalow was a fort from which none ventured after dark and which every night was guarded by sentries. Soon after work commenced it became evident that the cost had been under-estimated to an even greater extent than had previously been supposed. Opposition was experienced from the tribes immediately beyond the frontier, who early in the proceedings made a raid upon the labourers employed on the channel excavation and killed several of them, while the people within the British borders were also for a long time either openly or passively hostile.’ The work was nevertheless completely successful and its results are vividly portrayed in the official report. ‘In 1875 it was a barren wilderness, uninhabited and almost uninhabitable; by 1895 it was a wide expanse of cultivation, dotted with villages occupied by a law-abiding and contented peasantry. In 1875 there was not a tree to be seen; by 1895 avenues of trees had sprung up along the canals and its distributaries. In 1875 no officer was permitted to go outside cantonments without being armed and accompanied by an armed escort; by 1895 nothing of this sort was required and the tract was as peaceful and secure as any in the Punjab.’

The fifth phase, that of the great Punjab colonisation schemes—was in some ways the most spectacular of all; for whereas earlier irrigation works were generally concerned with improving existing cultivation, colonies were now planted in what had been barren deserts. The problems of organisation involved were many and complicated, but the fundamental principle was to map out the village sites, the grazing grounds and the units of land to be allotted, before any construction work began. In this way the maximum efficiency of irrigation was achieved and the disputes which arose elsewhere from the sharing of watercourses were avoided. While construction of the distributive channels was in progress, the revenue officers of the congested districts, from which the colonists were to be drawn, were at work selecting those who were to be invited or perhaps persuaded to go. Only peasants were selected and the aim was to choose ‘a band of men, all connected by ties and, to a large extent, by common descent, all physically fit to take up life in a new country under considerable initial difficulties, all short of land, but solvent and with sufficient resources to start them’. In other words, the object was to transplant not just individuals but communities. The difficulties involved in these operations have seldom been understood outside India; and in view of their importance in any estimate of the economic impact of Britain on India, it seems desirable to quote fairly extensively from the official account of the Lower Chenab canal colonies. ‘The tract . . . was one of extreme desolation. Water lay for the most part from eighty to one hundred and twenty feet below the surface of the soil while the rainfall was scanty and uncertain. With the exception of snakes and lizards the country was extraordinarily devoid of animal life; the vegetation, such as it was, consisted mainly of dusty shrubs, some of a certain value as fuel but others of no use either to man or beast, and grazing was, generally speaking, conspicuous by its absence. The only inhabitants of the country were the indigenous nomads, a spare and hardy race who eked out a precarious existence by means of their camels and goats, being almost independent of any form of diet other than milk.’ The area was opened up in 1892 and the early colonists had to contend with obstructions of many kinds. ‘There was no railway to the colony, and they had consequently to march there through a country nearly as waste as that to which they were going, inhabited by tribes which showed little mercy to immigrants whom they could waylay. Many, therefore, never reached the colony at all. Those who did found the tract peopled by nomads who neither desired nor expected the canal to be a success and who were determined to do all in their power to prevent its being so. The rainfall in the previous years had been very scanty and the country presented a particularly desolate appearance, so much so that many of the colonists refused to believe that the land was worth cultivating and returned to their homes. A serious epidemic of cholera broke out and though those who survived and had the pluck to persevere were rewarded by an excellent crop their troubles were not yet at an end, as the labour was insufficient to harvest it all and, even when harvested, there was still the difficulty of disposing of the produce which had to go by the same perilous way by which the settlers came. The opposition offered by the nomads of the tract was also a constant source of trouble, and perpetual attacks were made by them on the colonists who were, for some time unable to ward them off.’ Those colonists who persevered were indeed richly rewarded. Tremendous harvests were reaped, men who had been poor became well-to-do, peasants from other areas clamoured to be allowed to join the colony; and before long Lyallpur, the chief town of the colony, had become a large and prosperous city, an enduring monument to the perseverance and organising genius of a handful of British officials.

We cannot here follow this fascinating subject any further. The men who wrought these great things were not merely engineers—they were dreamers of dreams; and sometimes as they went about their daily labours they must have been inspired by that vision of the prophet Isaiah which was to be fulfilled through them:

‘And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. . . .
For in the wilderness shall waters break out,
And streams in the desert.
And the parched ground shall become a pool,
And the thirsty land springs of water.
In the habitation of dragons, where each lay,
Shall be grass with reeds and rushes.’

We must, however, leave the realm of poetry and conclude with facts and figures. The statement that the irrigation canals of India have a capacity of four hundred thousand feet per cubic second and that their length is eighty thousand miles does not convey much to the layman. More impressive is the statement that in 1947 nearly seventy million acres of land in undivided India were irrigated. This is not much more than one-fifth of the cultivable area of the sub-continent, but it is the largest irrigated area in any country in the world. According to the official pamphlet on irrigation published by the Central Board of Irrigation in 1947, it is indeed three times as large as the irrigated areas of the U.S.A, and larger than the combined total of any other ten countries in the world. The capital expenditure to 1947 on irrigation projects was 156 crores of rupees which, at the present rate of exchange, is equivalent to £117,000,000 sterling.

Not all the irrigation works included in this capital expenditure either were, or were intended to be, productive. There are areas where the danger of famine is so great that irrigation had to be undertaken as a protection against famine irrespective of the probable yield from water rates. Nevertheless the total revenue earned by the canals in India, after deducting the cost of maintenance and operation, is about 8 per cent of the capital outlay. Differential rates are charged for crops of different values or requiring different intensities of irrigation and the cultivator is very quick to know whether he gets value for money or not. The fact that irrigation is a commercially paying proposition to the various governments is a sure testimony to the wise planning and efficient construction that have characterised the work of the department.

Far more important, however, than revenue received by the Government is the value of the crops produced as a result of irrigation. This value was officially estimated in 1938–9 as about 105 crores of rupees. In other words, the annual value of the crops produced in the irrigated areas was then about two-thirds of the total capital outlay of irrigation. Even if we ignore the remarkable rise of grain prices in 1939, the conclusion is inescapable that irrigation in India has been a sound financial proposition and that in this sphere, above all, the application of Western science through British agency has been of incalculable value to the economy of India.

Chapter XLIV

The Improvement of Agriculture

Apart from irrigation, there were many respects in which Indian agriculture seemed to require improvement, but the knowledge necessary to bring it about was not available until late in the nineteenth century. According to the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, ‘the dependence of agriculture on empirical methods was general even in western countries until towards the middle of the nineteenth century’; and as far as such methods went, there was nothing that British officials could teach the Indian cultivator, with his great traditional knowledge and skill. In England the Rothamstead Research Station was opened in 1843, and at about the same time a widespread interest in soil chemistry developed. The impulse spread to India, and after the Orissa Famine of 1866 the establishment of a Government of India Agricultural Department was considered, but it was ultimately decided to concentrate available finance on irrigation for the time being. In 1869 the Manchester Cotton Supply Association strongly pressed the Secretary of State for India to establish an Agricultural Department and to appoint officials in connection with cotton cultivation. Here they were not altogether breaking new ground, for in 1839 the East India Company had sent twelve American planters to teach the more efficient cultivation and cleaning of cotton. It is probable, however, that not enough was yet known to do anything very practical in the sphere of agriculture, and the Government of India were almost certainly right in deciding to proceed slowly.

The report of the Famine Commission of 1880 gave a new impulse to the desire for more scientific progress. An Imperial Department of Agriculture on a small scale was set up, but ‘it was not until the recommendation that a forward movement in agricultural policy should be initiated had been repeated by a succession of conferences that the Secretary of State was convinced of the reality of the desire for the development of agricultural research’. In 1889 Dr. Voelcker, Consulting Chemist to the Royal Agricultural Society, was sent out to India to advise as to what should be done, and the Royal Commission rightly describes this as ‘the first serious endeavour to frame a policy of agricultural research suited to the conditions of India’.

In the meantime, some provinces had made attempts to deal with the problems of the cultivator. In Bombay a Director of Agriculture was appointed in 1883, but the Bombay Government, like the Government of India, felt that more knowledge must be collected before practical work could be done. The early work of the new department was, therefore, mainly statistical. In 1890 a Superintendent of Experimental Farms was appointed and this was the starting point of real progress in the Presidency. Courses in agriculture were also introduced, and from 1890 a diploma in agriculture was granted by the Baroda College.

In this period Madras had progressed on rather different lines. In 1863 the Governor had drawn attention to ‘the continuous cropping, the deficiency of manure and its consumption as fuel, the defective implements, the lack of trees, the poor cattle and the want of accurate knowledge and statistics’. Orders were accordingly placed for English ploughs and harrows and a 350-acre farm was opened at Saidapet, where the new implements could be tried. The whole experiment was characterised by the mistaken belief that English methods and implements would work satisfactorily in India, and little good came of it except the salutary lesson that perhaps the Indian cultivator knew his business best. The farm was then replaced by an agricultural college and useful work in agricultural education generally was undertaken. At about the end of the century, sugar cane, ground nuts, and pepper were all attacked with mysterious diseases, and in 1898 the Government of Madras therefore appointed an Economic Botanist to investigate the situation. This was the beginning of serious agricultural research in Madras.

The most practical and vigorous of all the early attempts at improvement was that of the United Provinces. Three district farms had already been started before Sir John Strachey created an Agricultural Department in 1875. The Department was instructed ‘to establish and prove to Indian agriculturists the advantages to be gained from small improvements such as they are able with the means at their disposal to carry out, and to make experiments as to staples and industries which it may be possible to introduce, if new, or to familiarise and improve if already existing in the country’. A tobacco farm and a silk farm were started, but proved unsuccessful; while excellent work was done on a fruit and potato farm in the Kumaon hills. Much attention was also given to cattle-breeding, and the report of the Royal Commission on this subject is interesting. ‘Whilst the work on cattle breeding, was not itself a success owing to the lack of a definite policy, the experiments in reclaiming usar²² land led directly to a development which had an important bearing on the cattle question. In these experiments, plots of land were taken up in different parts of the province and subjected to treatment. They were fenced and, in some cases, flooded and, when grass came up, it was grazed by cattle for the sake of manure. This led to enclosure, the keeping of small herds and the sale of milk which proved the beginning of a dairy industry. The farm at Cherat near Aligarh was placed in charge of Keventer, who eventually took it over from the Agricultural Department and the well-known Aligarh dairy farm thus originated in the Cherat usar farm.’

In Bengal little of real use was done during this period and the official report in 1893–4 is damning indeed: ‘The record of ignorant and unsuccessful experiments conducted on private estates at the instance of the department is rather ludicrous and at the same time rather lamentable. It is perhaps good for Government officers and zemindars to have taken this interest in the crops and learnt a few rudimentary lessons in cultivation and enabled themselves to share in the feelings of agriculturists as to the vicissitudes of weather, but it is idle to hope for any serious improvement in the agriculture of the country to be effected in this way.’

In the Punjab nothing substantial was attempted until the beginning of the twentieth century, when a demonstration farm was started at Lyallpur, in the new colonisation area.

Up to this time agricultural research had been unco-ordinated and mainly dependent on the energies of a few enthusiasts. In 1903 the vision and determination of Lord Curzon led to the foundation of the great Pusa research station and to the elevation of the Imperial Department of Agriculture into an adequately staffed and financed organisation. A little later the Indian Agricultural Service was inaugurated and at the same time provincial agricultural departments were rapidly expanded.

For the purposes of this book, the interest of these developments lies in the contrast between the hesitancy and even apparent reluctance of the British attempts to improve Indian agriculture, and the bewildering rapidity of progress in other departments, such as those of railways, public works and telegraphs. The explanation is that in the great public works of the time the engineers knew exactly what they were doing; whereas in agriculture knowledge as to what would pay in Indian conditions took a long time to acquire. The foundations of future development were nevertheless well laid, and important, though unspectacular, results were obtained. One or two examples will make clear what the difficulties were and how much was achieved.

Let us begin with cotton. Those who first tried to improve Indian cotton made the natural mistake of introducing exotics, but as Mackenna, the author of Agriculture in India, tells us: ‘Early workers were largely in the dark. No allowance was made for changes of environment or climate. Economic botany was in its infancy and plant selection, hybridisation and cross-breeding were only believed in by a few specialists. It was not until a trained staff applied the methods and technique of modern science to the agriculture of the country that any real progress on correct lines could be expected.’ After these early attempts at introducing exotics had failed, attention was concentrated on isolating pure types, improving quality by selection and securing the general use of the improved plants. Quite remarkable results were obtained, and in every province concerned yields and ginning percentages were rapidly increased. These results encouraged extended cultivation of cotton, and between 1895 and 1915 the area under cotton in India increased by 67 per cent.

Wheat provides another example of the need for patient research before improvements in production of crops can be brought about. Indian wheat is liable to an affliction known as ‘rust’ and early attempts at improving the crop took the form of introducing Australian and other foreign types which would, it was hoped, be rust-resistant. These attempts all failed. Either the hoped-for resistance was not developed, or there was some loss in milling and baking qualities. At this stage Mr. and Mrs. Howard arrived in India and set themselves to examine the problem systematically. Their work needs to be described by an expert and we therefore quote Mackenna again: ‘They undertook a complete survey of Indian wheats and separated type specimens of almost every Indian variety. From the wheat of the Punjab 25 types were isolated. These, it was proved, yielded as pure types enormously increased outturns, though great variations in yield were found.’ Other defects were then found including lack of what the millers call ‘strength’. The Howards, moreover, discovered ‘that all Indian wheats have weak straw—another serious disadvantage. In India the winter rains are often accompanied by high winds and in March hot dry winds prevail, with the result that the crop, if the straw is weak, is laid by rain and wind and much damaged. Weak straws, moreover, are very brittle and much loss of grain occurs when the crop is laid. It is essential, therefore, to strengthen the straw so as to obviate these dangers, and also that it may be able to carry the heavier heads which improved cultivation will produce.’

The Howards succeeded, by selection and cross-breeding, in obtaining types free from these defects and ultimately they developed the types known as Pusa 4 and Pusa 12. At the same time other improved varieties were evolved in the Punjab and within a few years it was estimated that 20 per cent of the wheat area of the Punjab was planted with one of the new strains.

It is not possible to follow similar developments with other crops—nor has the writer the knowledge to do so. It need only be recorded that in the case of almost every Indian crop, as well as with regard to livestock, patient research over many years produced continuous and often unnoticed improvement. When the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms came into force, agriculture became a Transferred Subject, and the Indian ministers who now became responsible for it had reason to be grateful not only for the sound work done by the Department, but also for the wise caution which led the Government of India in the nineteenth century not to advance with such precipitancy as to let action outstrip knowledge.

Chapter XLV

Development of Communications

Except for a few famous imperial highways, communications in pre-British India were poor, even when judged by the low standards of the day in other countries. Very few of the many rivers were bridged, roads were in most cases only passable during the dry season, and wheeled traffic was almost non-existent in the centre and south of the country. The river districts of Bengal and certain other areas were well served by boat, but elsewhere coolies, pack-ponies and pack-bullocks provided the main means of transport. In the first few decades of British rule little was done to improve this state of affairs, and even in the middle of the nineteenth century the Public Works Commissioners described the roads as ‘never made or improved . . . such as the carts are able to strike out for themselves, winding their way as best they can through the natural obstacles of the country’. In 1837 the Collector of Hoogly reported that ‘with the exception of the great lines of communication which are kept up by government, and which by the way are frequently in a wretched state, no provision whatever exists for making or repairing roads or bridges in the interior of the district. There is not a single road in the district which a European vehicle could traverse, while the number passable for hackeries²³ in the rains are lamentably few’. Sir George Campbell, writing in his memoirs with regard to conditions in 1852, stated that in ‘Oudh there were no roads at all not even the cart tracks so common elsewhere . . . before the Mutiny there were not sixty carts in all southern Oudh’.

Before the middle of the century, however, the great development in communications in England had fired the imagination of the Company’s servants and led to the great era of construction of roads, railways and canals in India. In 1839 the Company’s engineers embarked on the project of the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Delhi and thence to Peshawar, a distance of some one thousand four hundred miles. The importance of this road—described by a contemporary as ‘smooth as a bowling green’—was manifest at once. A check taken at one point in 1846–7, when only half the length was completed, showed that three hundred and ninety thousand tons of goods were transported over it by bullock cart or laden on camels and buffaloes during the year. The road fever was now in the air, and in 1840 another trunk road connecting Bombay and Agra was commenced, and in the same year a project for a road from Calcutta to Bombay via Ahmadnagar was started. At the same time innumerable feeder roads were constructed, the cost being met either by funds raised by a cess on local landholders or from the proceeds of tolls. Kaye, writing in 1853, quotes a contemporary writer of Cawnpore to the effect that ‘the district is intersected in every direction by unmetalled road, passable for nine months in the year. These roads are repaired every year after the rains. Exclusive of the trunk road (which is under the superintendence of an engineer officer) the aggregate length of road under charge of the Committee amounts to five hundred miles. The members of the committee are composed partly of European and partly of native gentlemen’. In the Lahore district, too, Kaye tells us that eight hundred miles of road had been laid down, while he quotes a report that seven hundred and twenty-six miles of road had been completed in the district of Salem and that in Tanjore, between the towns of Tanjore, Tivany and Combaconum the chain of communications had been rendered perfect. Still more striking is another quotation which Kaye makes from a contemporary local writer, regarding the building of bridges in Salem. ‘When the district was first handed over to our Government, an application was made to Colonel Read, by the officer commanding, for bricklayers to assist in building the officers’ bungalows. Colonel Read’s answer is on record and states that “no such person as a bricklayer existed in the district”. In the last two seasons a bridge has been built over the river Cauvery of twenty-six arches, each of sixty feet span, chiefly by bricklayers and artificers of the Salem district.’ In Bombay, too, great progress was made, and everywhere, indeed, there was evidence of a real determination on the part of British administrators to open up the country. This soon led to railway development.

It is interesting that in an industrially and technically backward country such as India, railways should have developed so early and so fast. The desirability of building railways in India seems to have been discussed first in the Calcutta newspapers in the early forties, but discussion might have gone on indefinitely had it not been for the initiative of Mr. (later Sir Macdonald) Stephenson, a British engineer who gave up his home practice and went to India in 1843, with the express object of building railways. In 1844 he put forward proposals for the construction of the first important line, and was fortunate enough to secure the support of the Bengal Government. Similar attempts were made by Chapman on the Bombay side and Andrew in the north-west, but the pioneers soon found themselves up against innumerable objections from the diehards of the day. It was alleged that Indians were too conservative to take to railways; that the heat in the carriages would be intolerable; that white ants would destroy the sleepers and that floods would sweep away the rails. The Directors were divided into two parties, the progressives and the reactionaries in this matter, and the progressives so far triumphed that in 1845 an eminent engineer, Simms, was sent to Calcutta with Stephenson to examine the possibilities. He unhesitatingly recommended the construction of a line from Calcutta to Delhi at a cost of £15,000,000 for the thousand miles involved.

The East India Company was clearly not in a position to provide £15,000,000 for this purpose and the policy of borrowing for capital projects had not yet been initiated. It was therefore necessary to attract British capital, and in the hope of doing this the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, proposed a subsidy of £1,000 per mile. The Directors of the Company were aware that the proposition was not an attractive one for British capitalists and therefore suggested as an additional attraction a guarantee of a 4 per cent return on £5,000,000 of the capital put out. This policy of guarantee has been frequently assailed, but there can be little doubt that it was necessary. It is interesting, indeed, to see how it appeared to a writer in the Quarterly Review in 1868 when the great constructive work was still going on. ‘This was the commencement of that system of guarantees which is one of the most important events in the history of the British Empire in the East. The era of material progress in India dates from the period when this principle of constructing remunerative public works with capital raised under a State guarantee was adopted by the Court of Directors. A surplus revenue in India was “like angel’s visits, few and far between”; and it no sooner made its appearance than it was absorbed by some pressing exigency. To have confined works of improvement within the limit of the funds which could be shared from the public treasury would have been tantamount to the entire neglect of them; but by alluring to the service of India a portion of the surplus of English capital, Government obtained access to a perennial spring of wealth liable to no interruption. It was thus enabled to prosecute railways with increased vigour, even at the time when the suppression of the Mutiny required political loans of unexampled magnitude.’

Neither the British Government nor the British investigating public were initially enthusiastic about Indian railways; and though the guaranteed rate of interest was raised to 5 per cent, the East Indian Railway Company was for some time unable to pay the deposit required of it. In 1849 that Company and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company, which had undertaken to construct a line from Bombay, signed their contracts. The Government was to have effective control over all major matters of policy, together with the right to buy the Company out after a lapse of twenty-five years. Even the Court of Directors was not enthusiastic, and the sum to be guaranteed was reduced and the mileage to be constructed initially was cut down considerably. Fortunately the railway companies showed great enthusiasm and ‘vied with each other for the honour of being foremost in the race’. The Bombay Company won, and India’s first train ran on 18th November 1852, followed four months later by the first train to Calcutta.

The Court of Directors of the East India Company gradually became convinced of the soundness of these projects and directed the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, to enquire into the principle of further development. Lord Dalhousie’s Minute of 1853 was masterly and provided the foundation for all future policy. It shows that political and commercial considerations both played their part and it deserves extensive quotation.

‘A single glance cast upon the map recalling to mind the vast extent of the empire we hold, the various classes and interests it includes, the wide distances which separate the several points at which hostile attack may at any time be expected; the perpetual risk of such hostility appearing in quarters where it is least expected; the expenditure of time, of treasure and of life that are involved in even the ordinary routine of military movements over such a tract . . . will suffice to show how immeasurable are the political advantages to be derived from a system of internal communication which would admit of full intelligence of every event being transmitted to the Government under all circumstances, at a speed exceeding fivefold its present rate; and would enable the Government to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point, in as many days as it would now require months, and to an extent which at present is physically impossible. . . . The commercial and social advantages which India would derive from their establishment are, I believe, beyond all present calculation. Great tracts are teeming with produce they cannot dispose of. Others are scantily bearing what they would raise in abundance, if only it could be conveyed whither it is needed. England is calling aloud for the cotton which India does already produce in some degree, and would produce sufficient in quality and plentiful in quantity, if only there were provided the fitting means of conveyance for it, from distant plains to the several ports adapted for its shipment. . . . Ships from every part of the world crowd our ports in search of produce which we have, or could obtain, in the interior, but which at present we cannot profitably fetch to them, and new markets are opening to us on this side of the globe under circumstances which defy the foresight of the wisest to estimate their probable value, or calculate their future extent. . . . A system of railways, judiciously selected and formed, would surely and rapidly give rise within this empire to the same encouragement of enterprise, the same multiplication of produce, the same discovery of latent resource, to the same increase of natural wealth, and to some similar progress in social improvement, that have marked the introduction of improved and extended communication in various kingdoms of the western world.’

The principles laid down by Lord Dalhousie and accepted by the Home Authorities were three in number. Firstly, priority was to be given to the construction of great trunk lines, and in selecting those lines considerable regard was had to military and strategic factors; secondly, railways should be constructed and operated through private enterprise; and, thirdly, the Government must maintain effective control. This policy was fruitful. The 5 per cent guarantee led to an immediate addition of £12,000,000 to the capital invested in Indian railways, and within the next ten years the guarantee had been extended to nine lines, involving a capital of £84,000,000 sterling. In 1863–4 there was a change of policy and the Home Authorities decided to replace guarantees by subventions. Capital was not forthcoming under the new system, and the Home Authorities reverted to the policy of guarantee, with the modification that the Government itself should finance lines required for political rather than commercial reasons.

Two interesting features of this early period call for comment. The first is that the capital employed was raised almost entirely in England. Up to 1868 £84,386,000 of capital had been raised and there were, according to the Quarterly Review of that year, 49,688 shareholders. Of these shareholders only 817 were resident in India, and less than one half of those were Indians. This cannot be ascribed to poverty, for, as the Quarterly Review points out, Indians at that time had £13,000,000 sterling invested in government securities. There were, of course, considerable drawbacks to the financing of railways by foreign private investment, but in the absence of Indian support it was fortunate for India that at this juncture she was able to draw upon the vast resources of Britain in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Another point of interest concerns the rapid response of Indians to these means of transport. We are told in the Quarterly Review of 1868 that ‘the railway took the fancy of the people at once, and the use of it became a national passion, which continues in unabated vigour though the novelty of it has worn off’. In that year nearly fourteen million passengers were carried and thereafter the railways grew continuously in popularity.

The completion of the great trunk lines brought the first phase of railway development to a close and in 1868 the local governments were invited to report which subsidiary and feeder lines should next be constructed. The second phase had now begun. In this phase the Government began to participate in construction and ownership of railways. In 1867 the principle of financing productive works out of loans had been accepted as regards irrigation, and in 1869 it was applied to railways. At first the new policy looked economical, since the Government could borrow at 4 per cent. The fall in the value of the rupee and the rise in interest rates soon changed the position, and when the Famine Report of 1880 emphasised the urgency of fresh construction the Government perforce turned once again to private enterprise for help. At this stage it will be convenient to take stock of results. By 1880 about two thousand seven hundred miles of railways had been built by the State and just over six thousand miles by private enterprise. The guarantee system was rightly condemned as extravagant, for, as was stated by the Finance Member of the Government of India, it made no difference to the railway companies under this system ‘whether the funds lent were thrown into the Hughly or converted into brick and mortar’. Nevertheless the system had achieved results which would not otherwise have been brought about, and a total government loss up to 1880 of £25,000,000 sterling cannot be regarded as heavy in proportion to the magnitude of the work, the value to the Indian economy and the difficulties under which it was first undertaken.

In 1880 a fresh orientation of policy introduced the third phase of development. Private companies were again encouraged to construct new lines, but the old system of guarantee was replaced by certain agreed terms as to the division of the earnings. The new arrangement was more satisfactory to the Government than the guarantee system and yet proved sufficiently favourable to encourage private enterprise. Development was rapid. By 1893 eighteen thousand miles of railway were being operated, and by the end of the century the Indian railway system was still on the way towards completion. Between 1900 and the outbreak of the first war, a further ten thousand miles were added, bringing the total mileage up to thirty-five thousand.

In this period the Government systematically took over company lines whenever the option came round. Thus the East Indian Railway Company was acquired in 1880, the East Bengal Railway in 1884, and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway in 1900. In some cases the Government managed the acquired railways itself and in other cases it handed them back to the companies for operation. For sixty years India thus displayed the unique feature of company-worked railways operating side by side with state-managed lines. Over both types of railway the Government exercised a considerable measure of control. In particular, from 1896 onwards a company was forbidden to borrow in India and all finance was raised by the Government.

The drawback to the system was, as pointed out by Vera Anstey in her well-known book The Economic Development of India, that ‘no well thought out co-ordinated programme extending over a period of years could be undertaken, because the railway budget formed an integral part of the general budget, so that the amount available for railway purposes depended not upon the railway needs of the country but upon the general financial situation’. This was not remedied until the railway finances were completely separated from the general budget after the Convention of 1924.

We need not pursue the subject of the development of railways any further, but must conclude this chapter by summarising the results achieved. By 1932 forty-two thousand miles of railways had been constructed at a capital cost of or nearly £650,000,000, and the Indian railway system was the third largest in the world. Over six hundred million paying passengers were carried annually, while net earnings were in the neighbourhood of £22,000,000. Up to 1899 the railways were a losing concern, but thereafter they began to pay, and when the Acworth Committee met in 1921 it found that the total net loss from 1858 amounted to less than £7,000,000 sterling. The fact that the unprecedented use made of the railways during the Second World War assisted the Government of India to pay off the capital debts involved may be regarded as fortuitous, but even before that period the long-term financial results of the Indian railways must be regarded as satisfactory. Professor L. A. Natesan in an extremely interesting and objective article in the Diamond Jubilee Number of the Calcutta financial journal Capital states the position fairly. ‘It is true,’ he writes, ‘that British interests had an eye on the advantages to be obtained from exploiting India’s requirements. But the fact that Indian railways have been singularly free from the over-capitalisation and financial manipulation which have burdened the railways of the U.K., the U.S., Canada and other countries is a tribute to the sense of financial integrity which characterised the administration of the railway policy of the country for over three-quarters of a century.’

The economic effects of the British development of roads and railways in India are almost too obvious to require to be stated. The growth of industry has been rendered possible; foreign trade has been facilitated, and world markets made available to the Indian producer; the evils of famine have been mitigated; and the economic isolation of the villages has been broken down. There are thoughtful men in India who doubt the value of these developments; who deplore industrialisation because of the social evils it brings with it; who lament the better transport facilities which have enabled the world to flood India with the cheap goods which have displaced the better quality goods of Indian craftsmanship; who believe that the ancient village economy furnished a better way of life than that provided by modern industrial and urban organisation. It is not for us here to arbitrate between the static and dynamic views of life, or to discourse on the value of material progress. On the assumption that such progress is desirable, the remarkable development of transport and communications must be regarded as one of the most important aspects of the impact of Britain on India. The effects of railway development are well summed-up by Professor Natesan in the article already quoted: ‘The railways not only assisted the economic unification of the country: they contributed also to its political consolidation. The habit of rail travel helped to break down the social barriers of caste and community in a vast population. The agriculturist as well as the industrialist expanded his business through diverse services and facilities rendered by railways. What the railways could do to avert the threat, or alleviate the effects, of famine in the country has been as forcefully demonstrated in the forties of the present century as during the seventies and eighties of the last. The growing volume of foreign commerce during the past sixty years would never have materialised but for the cheap rates and fast transport facilities provided by railways. The importance of railways for defence was brought out during the recent war when the enemy appeared at India’s gate. There can be no doubt that on the maintenance of the efficiency of the magnificent railway system of the country depends its future economic progress. With the increasing emphasis on internal production, the railways are now bending their energies to serve the new needs of the country.’

Chapter XLVI

Development of Communications

Up to this point in our study of the economic impact of Britain on India we have been mainly concerned with the policies and actions of the East India Company and the British Government. It is now necessary to consider the growth of industry and commerce under British capitalist control and to see how that process transformed India from a mediaeval to a modern state. This development can most conveniently be analysed under two heads, of which the first is the growth of large-scale industry, while the second is the establishment of new forms of business organisation. In this chapter and the next we shall deal with the first of these heads.

In Europe the elementary forms of capitalism and the factory system had begun to develop a considerable time before the great mechanical discoveries of the eighteenth century. In India no such general change had taken place before the British period, though in the seventeenth century there were signs of the development of large-scale industrial organisations in certain localities and particular industries. Bernier, for example, writing in the seventeenth century, describes the large halls, which he calls ‘kar-karnays’ or workshops for artisans: ‘In one hall embroiderers are busily employed, superintended by a master. In another you see the goldsmiths; in a third, painters; in a fourth, varnishers in lacquer-work; in a fifth, joiners, turners, tailors, and shoemakers; in a sixth, manufacturers of silk, brocade and fine muslins. . . . The artisans repair every morning to their respective kar-kanays, where they remain employed the whole day; and in the evening return to their homes. In this quiet and regular manner their time glides away; no one aspiring after any improvement in the condition of life wherein he happens to be born. The embroiderer brings up his son as an embroiderer, the son of the goldsmith becomes a goldsmith, and the physician in the city educates his son for a physician.’

The artisans evidently worked under discipline, but we know nothing as to whether the kar-kanays represented a genuine approach towards capitalism or not. Moreland, perhaps the leading authority on the economic history of this period, concludes that in general ‘production was carried on by artisans without superior capitalist direction’.

There were, however, industries in which by their very nature some degree of organisation was essential. Foremost amongst these was the diamond industry, and in this case Tavernier, who was particularly interested, tells us a great deal. He resolved to visit all mines, and as, he says somewhat smugly, ‘the fear of dangers has never restrained me in any of my journeys, the terrible picture that was drawn of these mines, situated in barbarous country to which one could not travel except by the most dangerous routes, served neither to terrify me nor to turn me back from my intention’. In the Rammalakota mines situated in the Carnatic, Tavernier tells us that ‘business is conducted with freedom and fidelity. Two per cent on all purchases is paid to the King, who receives also a royalty from the merchants for permission to mine. These merchants, having prospected with the aid of the miners, who know the spots where the diamonds are to be found, take an area of about 200 paces in circumference, where they employ fifty miners, sometimes a hundred if they wish the work to proceed rapidly. . . . The merchants who visit the mine to buy, remain in their dwellings, and every morning at from 10 to 11 o’clock the masters of the miners, after they have dined, (for the Banians never leave their houses till they have washed and eaten), take their diamonds to show them. If the parcels are large, and contain many stones of the value of from 2,000 up to 15,000 or 16,000 ecus, they entrust them to the foreign merchant for seven or eight days or more in order that he may examine them with care. When the stones have been examined, and are returned by the merchant, if they suit him he should conclude the transaction at once, otherwise the owner of the stones wraps them in a corner of his waistband, his turban or his shirt, and departs, so that one never sees the same stones again, or at least they are mixed with others, when the miner returns with another parcel. When the transaction is concluded the purchaser gives an order for payment on the Shroff or person who issues and receives bills of exchange. If you have agreed to pay in three or four days, and delay longer, you have to pay interest at the rate of 1½ per cent per month. Most frequently, when the merchant is known to be solvent, a bill of exchange on Agra, Golconda or Bijapur is preferred, but more especially one upon Surat, where, as it is the most famous port in India, the dealers desire to purchase the commodities which come in vessels from foreign countries, and are suitable for their wants’.

In regard to another mine at Gani, Tavernier states that ‘the first time I was at this mine there were nearly 60,000 persons working there, including men, women, and children, who are employed in diverse ways, the men in digging, the women and children in carrying earth’. He then describes graphically how ‘all who are about to engage in the search assemble, men, women, and children, together with their employer and a party of his relatives and friends. He brings with him a figure in stone of the god whom they worship, which is placed standing on the ground, and each person prostrates himself three times before it, their priest, however, offering up the prayer. . . . Then they wash their bodies with the water which each of them carries in a vessel, and sit down in ranks to eat that which is presented at the feast by their employer at the beginning of the work, in order to give them courage and induce them to acquit themselves faithfully. . . . When dinner is finished, each starts work, the men to excavate the earth, and the women and children to carry it to the place which has been prepared as I have said above. They excavate to 10, 12 or 14 feet in depth, but when they reach water there is nothing more to hope for’.

This was clearly large-scale capitalist organisation. In the shipbuilding industry, too, as well as in salt mining, we find similar developments, but these three industries are exceptional and if we exclude the kar-kanays of the emperor and the nobles mentioned above, production in India was still in the hands of individual artisans. Middlemen played an important part in distribution and advances by them to the craftsmen became increasingly common. This presumably involved some direction as to what should be produced, but there is little evidence on this point. Most authorities agree with Dr. Buchanan that, before the advent of the British, in general craftsmen and consumers dealt directly with each other.

The reasons for the lack of any real advance towards capitalism in the Mughal Empire cannot be discussed in detail, here, but perhaps the most important factors were the absence of a strong middle class and the lack of accumulated wealth. The emperor seldom allowed wealth to be inherited, and there was thus no incentive to accumulate; moreover, it was dangerous to appear wealthy. Bernier justly remarks that ‘rich men studied to appear indigent’. The caste system and the fact that under it those who practised commerce were seldom of much account socially must also have militated against the growth of the strong well-to-do middle class which has been the backbone of the capitalist system elsewhere.

The servants of the East India Company in the seventeenth century had a lively sense of the value of capitalist organisation and, moreover, practical difficulties soon arose from attempts to deal with innumerable individual craftsmen. The practice of advancing money to merchants who placed orders with the craftsmen often proved equally unsatisfactory. The records of the Company’s factories in the seventeenth century are full of stories of chicanery on the part of the middlemen or brokers, assisted in some cases by the English factors. Thus Somaji, an adroit broker of Surat, ‘received advances in rupees and had given them out to the weavers at 12, 14, 15 and 16 mahmoudies per cent rupees exchange and nothing brought to your account’. So intolerable were the abuses of these brokers that the President at Surat was ‘fully resolved to destroy this nest of vermin, if they prevent him not with foule play by an untimely doass to send him out of the world before his time, which hee is tould is threatened’. The Company also tried giving advances to the weavers themselves, but this worked little better, and it was therefore resolved that ‘we shall take care for the future that there bee noe money given into the weavers hands as formerly and they being poore men, those that trusted them were forct to receave taffetys though ever so badd’.

The obvious remedy for these troubles was the factory system. We learn from the Diary and Consultations at Ft. William that in 1704 eighteen looms were ‘to be fitted in the factories in order to make canvas in the rainy season for the use of the Company’s troops’. Two years later it was agreed that weavers working for the Company ‘must be overlooked’. Accordingly, the Company appointed ‘a native who is to give out the orders and to see that he has security so that the men can carry out what they had undertaken’.

When the Company assumed political power the tendency to organise manufacture on its own premises grew rapidly and filatures were established in many places. Sir William Hunter, the author of The Annals of Rural Bengal, goes so far as to say that ‘the most conspicuous monument of the rule of Warren Hastings appeared to be, not the administrative reforms which have been given a prominent place in history, but the weaving villages, filatures, and factories which he left in every district of Bengal’.

At a slightly later date private individuals who became agents for the Company were encouraged to undertake large-scale production. Sir William Hunter in the work already quoted describes the activities of one of these adventurers, a Mr. Frushard. ‘He spread a ring of cultivation and prosperity round his factory, and soon founded little tributary filatures throughout the whole north-eastern jungle of Beerbhoom. He seems to have been a very typical Englishman—too sanguine to be prudent at first, and too insular to sympathise with native ways, but eventually settling down into an experienced English planter with that rough, paternal liking which almost every Englishman in a Bengal district sooner or later gets for the simple people among whom he lives.’

Hunter goes on to describe the activities of the Company’s Commercial Resident in the same district and his establishment of silk, indigo, lac, fibre and oil seed industries giving employment to a rapidly growing population. ‘It is this influx of English capital that has chiefly given employment to the increased inhabitants, whom long-continued security to person and property has developed. Rural Bengal has ceased to depend for its subsistence entirely on the land; and so, although the quantity of land stands still, the population may with safety multiply. Nor is it too much to say, that independent British enterprise, once so hated and suspected by the Company’s servants, has now rendered it possible to give good government to India, without intensifying the struggle for life.’

In some cases much of this move towards industrialisation was premature. India was not technically equipped to compete with the products of industrial Britain, and the textile industry which had played so large a part in the economic activities of the Company declined rapidly in the nineteenth century. The spirit of capitalist enterprise was, however, active amongst Englishmen in India and from early in the century it directed itself to the development of the plantation industries.

The indigo industry is of particular interest in this connection, for in it we can trace the causes and the stages of the development of capitalism by the British in India. Indigo had been grown and manufactured in India from very early times, mainly in what is now the United Provinces, the Punjab and Western India, but opposition from the manufacturers of woad dyes had prevented it from finding a large market in Europe until the East India Company began to export it in the seventeenth century. Cultivation presented no particular difficulty and the simple processes of manufacture are thus described by Dr. Buchanan, who has treated this subject in considerable detail in The Development of Capitalist Enterprise in India.

‘The indigo plant matures rapidly and may be harvested within two or three months after planting, depending upon the soil and climate. The stocks are cut down when the plant begins to flower but are usually allowed to grow up for a second crop in the same year.

‘Dye is produced by packing the plant tightly, as soon as possible after cutting, and submerging it in vats of water at about 94° F. for some ten hours. When the plant is removed the colouring substance remains in the water. This water is then subjected to “beating” or stirring. A deposit is formed which, after being reduced by boiling several times, is cooled, pressed and cut out into the indigo cakes of commerce.’

Such simple operations might seem to provide little scope for the development of capitalism, but two factors operated in that direction. In the first place, as with most of the commodities they bought, the East India Company soon found it necessary to advance loans to merchants who, in turn, made advances to the cultivators. Secondly, adulteration was the rule rather than the exception and ‘certain clays of about the same consistency and of a similar colour were regularly dug and sold to mix with indigo’. Adulteration and inefficient production were indeed so prevalent that for a time indigo from the West Indies drove the Indian product almost out of the market. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the emancipation of slaves and other economic changes in the West Indies greatly reduced the scale of production of indigo there and the East India Company was again tempted to develop the industry in India. In this operation they lost heavily in the early days. The unsatisfactory nature of the produce sold by the cultivator led the Company, as well as private individuals, to bring experts from the West Indies to assist in the development of plantations. The areas mainly concerned were in Bengal and Bihar, but the economic positions of the industry in those two areas differed considerably.

In the fertile soil of the Bengal delta other crops were often more profitable to the individual agriculturist, on whom the indigo exporter initially depended, than indigo. Either pressure or some form of economic persuasion was therefore used in order to secure the cultivation of this crop by agriculturists. In some areas the difficulty was overcome right from the beginning by the establishment of plantations owned by British planters. More commonly, however, the cultivator was led to take an advance on condition of cultivating and manufacturing indigo to be sold to the planter at a price fixed in advance. The contract often covered a period of from five to ten years, and as the cultivators were seldom able to repay their advances in full, they were in practice bound to continue cultivating indigo indefinitely, even when other crops would have paid them better. The Indigo Commission of 1860 stated that ‘whether the ryot took his original advances with reluctance or cheerfulness . . . he was never afterwards a free man’, and according to Dr. Buchanan the village saying was: ‘If you sign an indigo contract you won’t be free for seven generations’. Apart from the economic pressure, the tyranny of the British indigo planters was notorious and in due course provoked a reaction against it.

In other parts of India other crops were less profitable than in Bengal, and indigo cultivation was relatively a good proposition, which agriculturists often undertook of their own free-will. There was, however, the perennial problem of coping with inefficiency and adulteration and this led planters gradually to take over more of the processes involved. In the first place, they bought partly manufactured indigo and finished the preparation themselves. A little later they aimed at buying raw indigo and carrying out the entire process of manufacture, this method being frequently linked with the system of advances previously described. In the next stage the planter acquired the rights of a superior landlord; the cultivator became his tenant on condition of cultivating a certain proportion of his land with indigo. The proportion usually fixed was one-fifth. This soon led to a stage in which the planter secured the raiyati holding himself, either by sub-lease or by mortgage and undertook the cultivation and manufacture of indigo by hired labour.

These processes were not as uniform or orderly as this description would suggest, but the outcry in the middle of the century against the oppression of independent cultivators by planters naturally encouraged the growth of the plantation system. This tendency grew strong in the second half of the century and by 1890, of the two hundred and forty thousand acres of indigo in Bihar one hundred and twenty thousand were on organised plantations cultivated by hired labour. Thus, says Dr. Buchanan, ‘as the business of the East India Company had passed from simple purchase of fully manufactured cloth through a number of stages, each tending to give the Company more complete control, until it manufactured silk and other articles under its own direction and at its own risk, so the business of the indigo planters passed from that of simple purchase through the various stages and methods of partial manufacture to that of Nij-a-bad²⁴ in which the planter both produced the raw material and manufactured it under his immediate control and under his own direction. In the early stages it appears that the rural people work better under their own direction; but with experience they have been gradually disciplined to a point at which they can be moulded and supervised as an organised labour force’. Madras provided an exception to this general trend, for in that Presidency indigo continued to be cultivated and manufactured on small farms or smallholdings.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century aniline dyes began to be developed and from that time onwards the indigo industry declined. Its expansion earlier in the century has provided an admirable example of the process by which British enterprise, working largely with capital borrowed in India, put new life into an industry which, though not previously organised on capitalist lines, was of long standing.

The background of the tea industry is very different. In that case British business men, working with home capital and through the agency of British planters, created an industry wholly new to India and in which all the expertise had to be imported from abroad. The story is of particular interest, partly because the initiative was taken by scientists, officials and explorers rather than by business men and partly because of the doggedness and tenacity of the early British planters in the face of almost incredible difficulties and hardships.

Tea was regularly drunk in India by the aristocracy at least as early as the seventeenth century, but the leaf was almost certainly imported from China. The tea bush had, indeed, existed in North-East India for centuries, but the areas where it was found were only known to the aborigines and in the early days of the East India Company it was not realised that there was any possibility of cultivating tea in India. Towards the end of the eighteenth century certain British botanists took the view that the plant could be introduced, and in 1788 Sir Joseph Banks wrote a memorandum advocating experiments in tea cultivation in Bihar and North Bengal. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century tea seed was sent to India from China and received a good deal of attention from botanical experts in Calcutta. At that time, however, the East India Company had the monopoly of the tea trade with China and was therefore far from anxious to develop a rival industry in India, particularly when it began to seem likely that the Company’s trade monopoly in India would be abolished. For forty years the recommendations of the botanical experts in favour of planting tea in North Bengal were therefore not implemented. In the meantime, it was discovered that tea grew wild in Assam, though the Calcutta experts were a little slow to accept the identity of the plant with the well-known China bush. The principal part in this discovery was played by the brothers Bruce, one of whom, C. A. Bruce, was to become the real father of the tea industry. He was of the stuff of which pioneers are made and it is worth quoting an extract from one of his letters reproduced in All About Tea by Ukers, the most authoritative work on this subject. ‘I left England in 1809 as midshipman on board the H.C. ship Windham, Captain Stewart, and was twice captured by the French on my way out, after two hard-fought actions; was marched across the Isle of France at the end of the bayonet, and kept prisoner on board of a ship, until that island was taken by the British; thus I suffered much, and twice lost all I possessed, and was never remunerated in any way. I afterwards went as an officer of a troopship against Java, and was at the taking of that place. At the breaking out of the Burmah War, I offered my services to Mr. Scott, then Agent to the Governor General, and was appointed to command gunboats. . . . It was my good fortune last year to go against the Duffa Gaum and his followers, who threatened to overrun our frontier, and it was my good fortune to expel him twice with my gunboat from two strong positions.’ ‘His researches through hundreds of miles of pathless jungle,’ says Ukers, ‘were first viewed with jealous suspicion by the native chiefs. He not only succeeded in removing all their prejudices, but actually persuaded them to aid him in his labours. . . . To him, almost alone, is due the bringing of the cultivation and manufacture to such a point that a commercial company was willing to take it up.’

In 1833 the Company lost its monopoly of the China trade and simultaneously ceased to be a commercial body in India. There was, therefore, no further reason for discouraging experiments in tea cultivation in India, and at the same time the threatened discontinuance of the import of China tea into England led to an agitation in London for efforts to plant tea elsewhere than in China. In 1834 Lord Bentinck, who was Governor-General at the time, appointed a Tea Committee to investigate the possibilities. Left to itself, the Tea Committee might have done nothing, for it seems to have had little belief in the possibilities of success; but at every stage it was urged forward by Lord Bentinck. More tea seed was brought from China and at the same time irrefutable evidence that tea was regularly made by aboriginal tribes in North-East Assam was produced. The Committee, at last stirred to enthusiasm, wrote:

‘It is with feelings of the highest satisfaction that we are enabled to announce to His Lordship in Council that the tea shrub is beyond all doubt indigenous in Upper Assam, being found there through an extent of country of one month’s march within the Honourable Company’s territories from Sadiya and Beesa to the Chinese frontier of Yunnan where the shrub is cultivated for the sake of its leaf.

‘We have no hesitation in declaring this discovery . . . to be by far the most important and valuable that has ever been made in matters connected with the agricultural or commercial resources of this empire.

‘We are perfectly confident that the tea plant which has been brought to light will be found capable, under proper management, of being cultivated with complete success for commercial purposes, and that consequently the object of our labours may be before long fully realised.’

Considerable dispute then followed as to whether China seed or indigenous Indian seed should be used for the first large-scale experiment, and the advocates of the China seed won the day. An expedition was sent to choose the locality for experimental cultivation, and after one bad mistake their reports led in 1837 to the establishment of an experimental garden at Chabua in North-East Assam, followed shortly by three more experimental gardens in the neighbourhood. Thanks largely to the dynamic energy and determination of Bruce, the Superintendent of Tea, the experiments were successful and in 1838 the first shipment was made to London.

The stage was now set for the entry of commercial enterprise, and in 1839 the Assam Company was formed with Bruce, the pioneer, as its Superintendent. It took over most of the East Indian Company’s gardens in 1840, but at once ran into difficulties. Attempts to introduce Chinese coolies led to riots and had to be abandoned. Bruce next tried bringing Indian labourers from distant parts. Again he met with disaster. To quote Ukers: ‘Cholera attacked them on their way up to Assam and those who survived took to their heels and were never seen again. The mortality among Europeans as well as among the native labourers was something appalling. Even the Company’s doctors died in their tracks. On every hand nature seemed to resent the intrusion of this white man’s enterprise, continually nagging him in its development.’ Nevertheless the Company persevered, and for ten depressing years, harassed by troublesome Chinese tea-makers, swindled by some of their European employees and baffled by the appalling sickness and mortality amongst those whom it could trust, it continued to lose money heavily. At last the tide began to turn. By 1847 unsuitable personnel—including, alas, Bruce the pioneer—had been weeded out and the right men were in charge. From 1852 the Company began to make profits, and in 1856 it paid a dividend of 9 per cent.

The success of the Assam Company soon encouraged others to invest money in the production of tea, and by 1859 as many as fifty concerns were operating not only in Assam but in other parts of India which had been found suitable for tea cultivation. There was nothing spectacular about the success of the early tea growers. Many of them died before they had sold a pound of tea, but those who survived reaped the reward of arduous toil and almost endless patience. They were followed, however, in about 1860 by a class of men whom Ukers has described as ‘speculators and get-rich-quick artists’. A wild tea mania gave every opportunity for the exploitation of simplicity and optimism; lands wholly unfit for tea cultivation were sold as tea gardens; bogus companies were floated; and, according to a contemporary, a ‘strange medley of retired or cashiered army and navy officers, medical men, engineers, veterinary surgeons, steamer captains, chemists, shopkeepers, stablemen, “used-up” policemen, clerks and goodness knows who besides’ rushed to make their fortunes as planters. The inevitable crash came quickly, bringing ruin and bankruptcy to many, but the industry was purged of unhealthy elements, and those of the old companies which had adhered to sound financial principles were soon seen to be in a prosperous condition.

From about 1870 a new phase of gradual and healthy expansion opened. In this period the life of a planter was both arduous and precarious. In many areas, before tea could be grown, dense jungle of fifteen feet high had to be cut down, roads had to be built, labour had to be imported and instructed—and at the same time the planter had to cope with the ravages of wild beasts and the even greater dangers of malaria and cholera. His life was solitary and devoid of luxury, and Ukers rightly describes the contents of a planter’s bungalow at this period as consisting of a stove, a platform bed of split bamboos, a table, a box which did duty as a chair and a medicine shelf.

From this time onwards the industry grew steadily, and in the last quarter of the century planters with an inventive turn of mind—notably William Jackson and Samuel Davidson—began to turn their attention to the possibilities of mechanisation. Mechanical rolling soon replaced hand rolling and in all departments of the industry a more scientific technique was evolved. By the end of the century 525,000 acres were under tea cultivation in India, production averaged 242 million pounds per year and the industry employed a labour force of over half a million. Indians had not yet begun to interest themselves in the ownership or management of tea gardens and the credit for all these developments goes entirely to Britain. Naturally the profits went largely to British shareholders, but they were a small proportion of the turnover and this new export industry added considerably to India’s external economic resources. We need not follow these developments further, except to notice that in the twentieth century Indians began to interest themselves financially and personally in the production of tea and that before the transfer of power a remarkable degree of cooperation between the British and Indian sections of the tea industry had developed. It would be wrong to leave the subject of tea without a brief reference to the treatment of labour. The rule of the early planters was rough and ready and often even harsh—and it is on this harshness that attention has generally been concentrated. Flogging was not infrequent; coolies were often induced by false pretences to emigrate to the tea districts—and once there were not allowed to leave until their time was up; and the planters were in many ways a law unto themselves. They were, however, few in number, and it is unlikely that a few foreigners, backed by a small police force, could have held undisputed sway over several hundreds of thousands of coolies if there had not been an essential justice about most of their dealings. There was perhaps always a time lag between the gradual softening of manners and discipline in England and any corresponding change in the remote tea districts, but by the twentieth century a new spirit began to appear. At the same time the Government became more conscious of its responsibilities in these matters and greater supervision came to be exercised over the recruitment and treatment of plantation coolies. By the third decade of the twentieth century it was true to say that, in spite of a low cash wage, the tea-garden labourer was better cared for and treated than the labourer in most other Indian industries. The planter had became his Ma-Bap.²⁵ The savings remitted to their home districts by immigrant tea-garden labourers were considerable and it can fairly be claimed that in this stage the existence of the tea industry was advantageous not only to the British shareholders and the general Indian economy but also to the labourers themselves.

Chapter XLVII

The Growth of the Major Industries

We must now turn from plantations to general urban industry. The economic impact of the British in that field can be suitably illustrated by a brief study of the development of the jute, iron and steel, cotton textile and coal-mining industries.

Hand spinning and weaving of jute were common in India from time immemorial and provided a useful auxiliary occupation for cultivators and fishermen and their wives. In The Romance of Jute, the standard work on this subject, D. R. Wallace quotes the following interesting passage written by a Calcutta merchant early in the nineteenth century:

‘The great trade and principle employment of jute is for the manufacture of gunny chuts or chuttees i.e. lengths suitable for making bags. This industry forms the grand domestic manufacture of all the populous eastern districts of Lower Bengal. It pervades all classes and penetrates into every household. Men, women and children find occupation therein. Boatmen in their spare moments, husbandmen, palankeen carriers and domestic servants; everybody in fact, being Hindus—for Mussulmans spin cotton only—pass their leisure moments, distaff in hand, spinning gunny twist.

‘Its preparation together with the weaving into lengths forms the never-failing resource of that most humble, patient and despised of created beings, the Hindoo widow, saved by law from the pyre, but condemned by opinion and custom for the remainder of her days, literally to sackcloth and ashes, and the lowest domestic drudgery in the very household where once, perhaps, her will was law. This manufacture spares her from being a charge upon her family—she can always earn her bread. . . . There is, perhaps, no other article so universally diffused over the globe as the Indian gunny bag. All the finer and long-stapled jute is reserved for the export trade, in which it bears a comparatively high price. The short staple serves for the local manufactures and it may be remarked, that a given weight of gunny bag may be purchased at about the same price as a similar weight of raw material leaving no apparent margin for spinning and weaving.’

With the general growth of world trade in the early nineteenth century, the export of homemade gunny bags increased, the principal consignments being to South-East Asia and North America, while India herself used nearly half the total production. As a cottage industry, however, jute manufacture never obtained any great efficiency and the quality of the products was poor. At the same time, Bengal, to which area the crop was mainly confined, had at that time practically no coal or other fuel and the establishment of a factory industry was out of the question.

In 1822 the Dundee Flax Spinners experimented with jute manufacture, but the results were unsatisfactory, and it is reported by Wallace that ‘warranted free from Indian jute became a common condition of business’. By 1838 considerable improvement in the technical processes concerned had taken place and Dundee factories rapidly took to using jute in place of flax. In the middle of the century, therefore, Bengal began to export large quantities of raw jute to Dundee; and when the Crimean War interrupted the supply of flax and hemp from Russia, jute almost completely and permanently took their place. For a time the export of handmade jute products from Bengal continued, but later a decline set in and by the end of the century factory competition had practically killed the old cottage industry.

The development of the Bengal coalfields in the middle of the nineteenth century made it possible to establish jute mills in Bengal. In 1854 George Ackland, who had been first a naval officer and then a Ceylon coffee-planter, entered into partnership with Bysumber Sen and in 1855, with the aid of a Dundee jute overseer, they started the first Indian jute-spinning mill at Rishra, near Serampore, on the banks of the Hugli. For a time they also carried on hand weaving. In 1859 the Borneo Company, largely influenced by George Henderson, carried the development a stage further and introduced power looms for jute cloth. Unlike Ackland’s company, this concern prospered right from the start and made good its capital twice over in a period of twelve years. In these days when ‘welfare work’ is supposed to be a modern invention, it is interesting to notice that the hard-headed proprietors of this pioneer company started a recreation scheme, including social gatherings, debates, a billiard-room, a library and a savings bank for their European assistants and their Indian clerical staff. Nobody wanted the scheme, however, and it came to an end.

There were at this time no technicians in India at all for this type of work and Europeans were therefore brought to the country even for the work of blacksmiths and carpenters. Besides running their own jobs they trained Indians, and they can truly be regarded as the pioneers of technical education in India—though most of them were tough, practical men, who would have scorned any idea that they were educationists.

From this stage development was rapid. By 1873 over one thousand two hundred looms were in operation and satisfactory dividends were paid. As had been the case in the tea industry ten years earlier, the prosperity of the pioneers tempted too many optimists and led to unhealthy expansion. According to D. R. Wallace, ‘it was only necessary to issue a prospectus of a jute mill to have all the shares snapped up in a forenoon’. From 1872 to 1875 thirteen new mills were launched and the number of looms was trebled. Shares naturally slumped and four mills closed, but one good result of the trouble was that the mill owners were forced to develop new markets in Australia and New Zealand and to compete seriously with Dundee for the sale of hessian to America.

United Kingdom manufacturers in the nineteenth century always resented the growth of competition in India. They regarded that country solely as a British possession, suitable for commercial exploitation, and they saw no reason why it should be allowed to compete with home industry. Direct attacks on the Indian jute industry seemed unlikely to succeed and the Dundee mill owners therefore developed a great concern for the welfare of Indian labour. The Dundee Chamber of Commerce petitioned the Secretary of State proclaiming that the laxity of the Indian Factory Act allowed women and young persons to work long hours and they harped on the physical and moral evils incidental thereto. Unfortunately for Dundee, the resulting enquiry did not support the complaints which had been made and this attack therefore failed. Production was now outstripping demand, and from this date onwards the restriction of hours or output was necessarily a permanent feature of the jute industry—except in time of war.

The First World War gave a great stimulus to the manufacture of jute. In spite of the initial partnership between Ackland and Babu Bysumber Sen the industry had up to this time been almost entirely in British or to a lesser extent American hands. Indians now began to participate in it in an ever-increasing proportion. This process was intensified in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and according to an article in the Jute Survey and Directory published by Capital in 1951, by 1937 67.3 per-cent of the shares in forty-five jute companies surveyed were in Indian hands. Control had also changed pari passu with share ownership. Capital gives the following figures to show how this change continued in the next decade.

	1939		1949
	Indian Directors	European Directors	Indian Directors	European Directors
13 jute companies	nil	49	19	44
21 jute companies	35	52	63	35

An industry started in India by British businessmen with the aid of British capital and British technicians had not only grown into a serious rival to the Dundee jute mills but had also became a largely Indian-owned and directed industry. The significance of this development will be realised when it is remembered that before the Second World War jute was the most important export industry of undivided India.

In the industries which we have so far considered—railways, indigo, tea and jute—development was the result of British enterprise and technical skill, operating with capital mainly raised either in the United Kingdom or from British Agency houses in India. A great contrast is presented by the iron and steel industry, in which the first major project was produced by the genius and determination of a Parsee, financed mainly by Indian capital. Jamsetjee Tata was able to draw on the experience of British failures and at the crucial stage received great help from the British Government, but the initiative was his alone and his enterprise was the precursor of a new spirit then about to arise in India.

The manufacture of wrought iron in India has a long history behind it and it has been stated, though on what authority it is not clear, that the celebrated Damascus swords of the Middle Ages were forged in Hyderabad. Manufacture was carried on in widely scattered localities by people of low caste who, from the nature of their work, were rather more highly organised than their contemporaries in most other industries. When Dr. Francis Buchanan made his famous tour through South India as what we should now call an official economic observer he left it on record that at each smelting works twenty men were employed and that their functions were divided as follows:

‘In the smelting house there are,

1 man to put in the ore and charcoal, and to take out the iron,
3 men to blow the bellows,
6 men to supply the charcoal,
1 man to supply the ore. In a forge that is about two miles from the mine, he must keep 5 asses.

In the forging house there are,

1 blacksmith to manage the fire and furnace,
2 bellows men,
3 hammer men,
3 charcoal men . . . ‘

The proceeds were shared between masters and workers in a standard proportion. The masters paid rent and royalties, and met the cost of sacrifices to the god of furnaces and to the local deities, besides advancing funds to the workers until the iron was sold.

The methods used were primitive and little was done to develop them by the British or other European trading companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One attempt was made to manufacture cannon and shells in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the iron resources of Madras were investigated, without practical result, early in the nineteenth century. A little later a much more determined attempt was made by Josiah Marshall Heath, a Madras Civil Servant, who had become interested in the local steel manufacture of Salem. Encouraged by the Governor, Sir Thomas Munro, he retired from the Civil Service, studied the iron industry in England for four years, and in 1830, with the aid of English workmen and machinery, established an iron works at Port Novo on the coast of the Madras Presidency. Heath’s interests were not confined to iron. He was also a textile manufacturer and contractor for the East India Company and he hoped to finance the iron works in their initial stages from the profits of his cloth dealings. Evidently Heath, although inventive and a man of vision, was not a very good business man and he lost money with equal facility in textiles and iron. His engine boiler burst and the machine had to be driven by bullocks; and, moreover, he seems to have imported into India quite unsuitable machinery for the purpose.

Several times the Government had to come to his financial rescue, which they did readily enough until about 1850. From then onwards—either because the Government of India was becoming less friendly to commerce or because they had doubts about this particular enterprise—the Government was less disposed to help, and early in the second half of the century the concern came to an end. The failure was generally attributed to technical incompetence and lack of experience, but experts today put it down to more scientific competition from England and to the impossibility of making a commercial success of large-scale smelting with charcoal as the only fuel. According to Lovatt Fraser, the author of Iron and Steel in India, one square mile of Indian forest produced sixty-four tons of charcoal and three and three-quarter tons of charcoal were required for each ton of iron. Attempts were made to split up the work and draw on several sources of charcoal supply, but a system which required annually one square mile of forest area for every seventeen tons of iron was clearly unworkable.

Several other attempts to develop the iron industry were made either by the Government or by private enterprise between 1840 and 1870, but all were dependent on charcoal and all failed. From 1875 onwards attempts were made to smelt iron with coal. The Government of India carried out experiments with the coal and the ores of the Chanda district in the Central Provinces and at the same time the Bengal Iron Company began to operate in the Raniganj coalfield. This latter venture turned out not to be commercially profitable and it was therefore acquired and worked by the Government for eight years, after which it was sold back to the Bengal Iron and Steel Company. Production, however, was small compared with India’s needs and heavy imports continued.

No other important development took place until Jamsetjee Tata, who was both a successful business man and a dreamer of dreams, was at last able to give practical shape to the thought of a lifetime. His imagination was fired by a report of von Schwarz, a German expert who had managed the Raniganj venture under the Government, but he did not accept von Schwarz’s view that the available coal was no good for coking. He had coal from Warora examined in England, and then asked for a concession to work the Chanda area, stipulating that he should be given control of the branch line of the G.I.P. Railway which would serve the iron works. He apparently regarded this condition as vital; and since the Government were not prepared to accept it, he dropped the project for a time. Lovatt Fraser comments that ‘the time was to come long afterwards when the Government of India were to spend over a quarter of a million sterling on building forty miles of new railway to assist Mr. Tata in his scheme for iron and steel works’—but that time was still distant.

In any case, Tata would perhaps have found it difficult to work under the mining and prospecting rules as they then existed. They were narrow and restricted in the extreme, until Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty introduced a complete change in the attitude of the Government of India towards industry. Henceforth the industrialist was to be regarded as a patriot and friend of India rather than as a pirate, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, in this new atmosphere, Mr. Tata returned to his old dream of a great Indian iron and steel works. He had experiments in the coking capacity of the available coal made in Germany and in America; and he discussed the project endlessly in England, as well as with almost every iron and steel expert in the United States of America. There he found the experts who were to help him to translate his vision into a reality. A long period of laborious prospecting, with results that were generally disappointing, followed, and at one time Tata and his experts were about to inform the Government of India that it was not possible to go ahead. Almost by accident they stumbled upon a rich and workable deposit—and the story is so dramatic that it deserves to be told in the words of Lovatt Fraser.

‘Sir Dorab Tata went to Nagpur to see Sir Benjamin Robertson, then the Chief Secretary of the Central Provinces Administration, to inform him about the conclusion they had arrived at. The Chief Secretary happened to be out, so he drifted rather aimlessly into the museum opposite the Secretariat to await his return. There he came across a geological map of the Central Provinces, printed in colours. He noticed that the Drug District, near Raipur, about 140 miles from the Chanda area, was coloured very darkly, in a hue which was meant to indicate large deposits of iron.

‘The prospectors lost no time. They did not know what lay before them, but they thought the Drug District was worth looking at. Mr. Weld, accompanied by Mr. Saklatwala, went at once to the spot indicated, and put up at a dak bungalow at another Lohara, called Dondi Lohara.

‘So he started early one morning in a country cart, and by a lucky chance took his gun with him in the hope of picking up some game for the cooking pot. Those who were shadowing him, not having heard of any other deposits in those parts, believing that he was going out on a shooting expedition only, did not think of following him and were thus thrown off the scent. He reached the village he was looking for and found some iron smelters who worked with primitive furnaces. He asked them where they got their ore, and they took him to a hill about 300 feet high. “We get it from this hill,” they said. Mr. Weld climbed the height, and was astonished to find that his footsteps rang beneath his feet as though he was walking upon metal. That was precisely what he was doing. He had found a veritable hill of almost solid iron! No more striking and remarkable discovery has ever been made in the whole history of the iron industry; and there was another hill not far away which was chiefly composed of iron also.

‘Hurrying back to Nagpur at once, he applied for a prospecting license for the Dhalli and Rajhara hills; the license was granted, in due course, after some official delay.’

Even this, however, did not prove to be the area that was to be chosen for the Tata project. Equally rich deposits, nearer the coalfields and nearer the sea, were found in the State of Mayurbhunj, and there was now no doubt that the process could go ahead. It only remained to raise the capital, and Sir Dorab Tata, son of Jamsetjee Tata who was now dead, took it for granted that it must come from England. It was not, however, a propitious time for raising capital in England, and in spite of the favourable report of the British experts money was not forthcoming. Whether this was to any extent due to the fact that the project was to be controlled by an Indian rather than by an Englishman is not clear. In this year, 1907, there was in India much talk of swadeshi,²⁶ and, inspired by this new spirit, Sir Dorab and his colleagues took the great decision to raise the capital in India and from Indians. The appeal was an unqualified success, and according to one of the engineers concerned with the building of the new works:

‘From early morning till late at night, the Tata Offices in Bombay were besieged by an eager crowd of native investors. Old and young, rich and poor, men and women they came, offering their mites; and, at the end of three weeks, the entire capital required for the construction requirements, £1,630,000, was secured, every penny contributed by some 8,000 native Indians. And when, later, an issue of Debentures was decided upon to provide working capital, the entire issue, £400,000, was subscribed for by one Indian magnate, the Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior.’ Much has rightly been made of this successful issue but the company was seriously under capitalised and suffered embarrassment for a considerable period.

We must turn now to the cotton textile industry. Although that industry has, right from its commencement, been mainly owned by Indians, Britain has played an important part in its development. Many of the managers and a majority of the overlookers in the early days were Lancashire men and the machinery was almost wholly manufactured and installed by British engineering firms. Moreover, the general impulse to organise a factory industry was a result of British contact and example. A brief sketch of the rise of the Indian cotton textile industry is therefore necessary for our purpose.

Innumerable writers on India have quoted the statement of Herodotus: ‘India had wild trees that bore fleeces as their fruit . . . of these the Indians made their clothes.’ The cotton-spinning and weaving industry flourished in India throughout the Middle Ages, declined in the chaos of the eighteenth century, was first discouraged and then encouraged by the East India Company, but was almost ruined in the nineteenth century by the cheap products of the Industrial Revolution in England and by the policy of free trade imposed on India. Up to this time raw cotton had been grown in India primarily for her own consumption, but the internal demand now diminished while exports to England increased rapidly, reaching a figure of ninety million pounds in 1816 as compared with an average of six million pounds in the period 1776–1780. At the same time the export of cotton goods from India declined and in the first half of the nineteenth century the economic pattern was that generally described as a colonial economy.

By the middle of the century, however, a new spirit was abroad, particularly amongst the highly educated and enterprising Parsee community of Bombay. It was due to this progressive spirit as much as to proximity to the Gujerat cotton districts that Bombay became the home of a new cotton-spinning factory industry. Before that time two power mills had been established by Englishmen, one near Calcutta and the other in Broach, but these were isolated enterprises, of little importance for our purpose. The first significant development occurred in Bombay in 1851, when a wealthy Parsee, Cawasji Nanabhoy Daver, decided to establish a cotton-spinning factory and issued a prospectus for the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company. As little help and advice could be obtained in India on this subject, Daver had recourse to Messrs. Platt Bros. Company of Oldham, who advised him as to the machinery required and indeed as to the whole project. Provision was made for twenty thousand spindles and the mill began working on 5th February 1854. Weaving was in the first place to be done by hand. The company prospered and continued working until it was destroyed by fire in 1887.

Several other cotton mills were soon established, amongst them being the Coorla Mills, which were bought thirty years later by the greatest of all Indian industrialists, Mr. Jamsetjee Tata. For many years the Coorla Mills were in difficulties. Their distance from Bombay was a handicap and labour was not readily available. The proprietor’s son was sent to England to confer with experts as to the most suitable types of machinery, and experienced managers and technicians were taken from Manchester and Oldham. The mills, however, were badly designed and were equipped with too many different types of machines. They were thus expensive to run and never really paid until Mr. Jamsetjee Tata completely reorganised them. By 1870 there were in Bombay five spinning mills and eight weaving mills, using two hundred and ninety-one thousand spindles and four thousand one hundred looms.

The American Civil War then completely changed the economic foundations of Bombay life, for supplies of cotton from America to Britain were interrupted and Indian cotton was in great demand. Prices rose to five or six times the normal level and vast fortunes were made. It has been calculated that the five years of the Civil War added £75,000,000 sterling to the wealth of Bombay, and when the war was over those who escaped the subsequent crash were in a position to invest in modern mills. Expansion was rapid, and fifteen new mills with four hundred and sixty-one thousand spindles and three thousand six hundred and eighty looms were established between 1870 and 1875. The Alexander Mill was founded in 1868 by Jamsetjee Tata. He sold it in 1872 and proceeded to England to make a systematic study of the industry in Lancashire and so laid the foundation of his unrivalled industrial knowledge. From this stage onwards the progress of the industry was steady and by the end of the century eighty-four mills were in existence in Bombay, while the industry was also growing fast in Ahmedabad and elsewhere.

It is not necessary to pursue these developments further, beyond recording that in 1939 three hundred and fifty-five mills using over eight million spindles and one hundred and sixty-eight thousand looms and employing over four hundred thousand workers were in operation.

Lancashire men played a great part in the development of this industry. Lest an Englishman might be thought to be exaggerating that part, let us quote from the well-known Indian authority on this subject, S. M. Rutnagur: ‘The Parsee and Hindu merchants were necessarily ignorant of the plant and processes of manufacture. The machinery was erected by fitters from Lancashire with the help of natives whom they trained but whose language they did not understand. The carding, spinning and weaving masters were invariably selected and sent out by the makers of the machines, and the different departments were worked by them with the help of Parsi assistants and Hindu jobbers. For many years the success of the factories depended upon the skill and experience of Lancashire managers and the quality of the spinning and weaving machinery, the bulk of which came from the best known British makers. The cotton trade thus made rapid strides and has revolutionised the industrial situation in India, and the present generation of Indian spinners and weavers have to acknowledge with gratitude the services rendered by the early band of Britishers who came out to give practical instruction in the erection and working of cotton machinery at the pioneer factories in Bombay.’

In many cases the fitters who were sent out from England to erect the machines stayed on as overlookers, but this was often not a success. Men of better education and qualifications began to be sent out, and in the ’sixties and ’seventies Lancashire men were running the mills in close and friendly collaboration with the many Parsees who took rapidly to the new industry. The work was strenuous, and Rutnagur quotes an agreement providing that ‘the working hours of the said John Smith shall, in the ordinary course of his employment, be daily from six in the morning until sunset’. At the same time John Smith was required to ‘impart all information, practical and theoretical, in all branches of his duties and to the best of his ability, to all native apprentices and jobbers, and to the work-people under his charge without any additional fee’. These Lancashire men were, in fact, expected to train their successors, and the proportion of Indians in responsible posts soon began to increase. In 1895 there were about as many Indians as Europeans, while in 1925 only one-third of all managers were Europeans. In the lower grades the change was still more rapid. Relations between the European and Parsee managerial staff as well as between European managers and and labour were almost uniformly good, and the Lancashire men contributed to the industry not only technical skill but also knowledge of how to handle staff and operatives under the conditions of the modern factory system.

The British manufacturers of machinery were not slow to grasp the opportunity provided by the growth of the Indian textile industry. Machinery was frequently supplied on deferred payment terms, the bulk of the purchase price being paid only after the mill had started working—when it was comparatively easy to call for the unpaid capital. Thus says Rutnagur: ‘Lancashire machinery manufacturers and exporters were in a way instrumental in furthering the development of the textile industry in India in competition with the import of British-made piece goods and fabrics.’ The industry, indeed, provided a perfect example of Indo-British collaboration.

The development of the coal-mining industry, which followed a different pattern from the industries so far studied, is perhaps the best measure of the quickening industrial tempo. From the middle of the nineteenth century iron began to be used abundantly and the demand for coal thus steadily increased, while at the same time the development of railways and steamers created a direct market for Indian coal.

In 1774 two enterprising Englishmen, Sumner and Heatley, applied to Warren Hastings for permission to raise coal in Pachete and Birbhum. In the following year two thousand five hundred maunds of coal were sent to Calcutta, but the Company’s military storekeeper reported caustically that ‘the same work could be performed by one maund of British coal that could be done with two maunds of the country’s coal in much less time and with not nearly so great a waste of iron’.²⁷

This failure damped down further efforts for a while, but certain individuals such as Mathew Smith, an eminent shipwright in Calcutta, began to use coal from Pachete for their own works, and in 1814 Jones was detailed by the Government, on the recommendation of Mathew Smith, to examine the possibilities. He reported that ‘the remains of Mr. Heatley’s work were distinctly visible, that the natives knew their origin and stated them to have been conducted by Europeans who fell a sacrifice to a pestilential fever’. Jones’s report was evidently convincing and the Government gave him a princely grant of half a lakh of rupees on the security of Alexander & Company to start operations. Like so many British pioneers in India, Jones did not survive long enough to benefit by his enterprise and on his death in 1892 Alexander & Company took over the concern.

A little later Jessop, who had been a partner of Alexander & Company, set up a rival concern not far away, and for reasons that are not clear it was transferred in 1836 to Gilmore, Homfray & Company. Homfray had little use for Jones or for academic geologists, and he writes pungently of ‘the school of modern Mineralogists of snail hunters and saxo-florists’ and of the errors of Jones.

In the meantime Alexander & Company had failed and the new mines were in the hands of Babu Dwakanas Tagore. A new company, Carr Tagore & Company, was floated to operate them. For a time the two rival companies, Gilmore, Homfray & Company and Carr Tagore & Company continued to operate, but in 1844 they amalgamated to form the Bengal Company, and it was this company which mainly developed the Raniganj coalfield.

For a time transport was the main difficulty. Coal was sent by shallow boats down the Damodar River in the monsoons but this was a risky business and it was only after the East India Railway Company constructed a line up to the Raniganj coalfield in 1855 that development became rapid.

It was not until a considerable time later that the other main Indian coalfield, that of Jharia, was exploited. The existence of abundant coal in that field was known at least as early as 1838, but transport difficulties seemed insuperable and in 1838 Mr. Taylor of Carr Tagore & Company reported that ‘our people have returned from reconnoitring the coal lands at Jherriah mentioned by Lt. Hannington; the result is that the coal will not be available for any useful purposes, the course of the River abt. 10 miles or 5 Koss about Cheena Coory being obstructed by a line of rocks extending 6 miles or 3 Koss, thus rendering the navigation impracticable at any rate in its present state, and I suspect that no one would like to undertake the Herculean task of blasting these 6 miles of rock with powder. We may therefore safely acct. this as an insurmountable difficulty and not concern ourselves any further about it, the coal is good but it must remain on the spot’.

In 1861 and again in 1887 officers of the Geological Survey called renewed attention to the existence of considerable coal deposits in Jharia, but nothing was done until the East India Railway authorities extended the line to that area. A number of individuals and companies then obtained mining leases and the field soon became important.

It is not necessary to follow further developments. Enough has been said to show that the establishment of a coal-mining industry in India was almost entirely due to British enterprise. The technical skill came wholly from India and the capital holding was largely British. It is interesting to note that of the fifty-one shareholders of the Equitable Coal Company in 1864 only three were Indians; while the prominent part played by Scotsmen is illustrated by the fact that no fewer than seven of the fifty-one names begin with ‘Mac’. The early annals of that company serve to illustrate the difficulties which the pioneers had to encounter. In 1864 a great cyclone disabled most of the steamers on which the company depended for transport of coal to Calcutta. In the same year we have a complaint, which sounds familiar to modern ears, that the railway company which served the coalfield was short of wagons. The profit that year was, as a result, negligible.

In the early years the local demand for coal was very limited and the East India Railway was the Company’s most important consumer. Demand then grew rapidly and at the same time imports of coal from England decreased, so that by the end of 1866 the Directors were able to report that the demand greatly exceeded the supply and that the chief limitation was the inadequacy of the railway rolling stock. In 1866 the pumping machinery broke down and work was stopped for a time. More serious were the effects of the great famine of that year which for a few weeks disintegrated the labour force. In the following year a serious cholera epidemic resulted in the death of a hundred miners and created such panic that many others ran away, bringing work to a standstill. The company nevertheless surmounted all these difficulties and steadily prospered, as did its rivals also.

These early coal companies indeed vindicated capitalism at its best and at the same time laid the foundation of the future industrial development of India.

Chapter XLVIII

The Managing Agency System

Perhaps the most important British contribution to the Indian economy in the nineteenth century was the development of a new form of business organisation, without an exact parallel elsewhere, known as the Managing Agency System. In its most general form this system means that a managing agent instead of merely operating an industrial undertaking owned by himself promotes, partially finances, and completely manages other industrial concerns in which he probably, but not necessarily, holds a considerable number of shares. Not all these characteristics are present in every case, and the essence of the system is the contract to manage. Like so many British institutions, it did not grow up as the conscious creation of a new method, but developed naturally to fill a vacuum in Indian commercial organisation.

As we have seen, there was practically no large-scale industrial organisation in eighteenth-century India, and even commerce was in a chaotic state on account of the prevailing political instability and the breakdown of the currency arrangements. For a time, in the sphere of foreign trade, the East India Company supplied the necessary organisation, but gradually its commercial importance declined and private British merchants began to take its place. This process was completed when the Company ceased to be a trading organisation in 1833.

The commercial classes of England were at this time in a dynamic, expansive mood, and when British merchants in India began to prosper they looked round for profitable ways of utilising their wealth. There were no Indian commercial or industrial enterprises in which to invest and they therefore considered the possibility of promoting industries themselves. They were not industrialists, but keen business men who realised that in spite of India’s great undeveloped resources she completely lacked industrial leaders and managerial skill. Before the middle of the century British merchants began to establish new industries, bringing out experts from home for the purpose. They generally formed partnerships, often on a family basis, but later in the century the private company became the favourite form of organisation.

The partners were not technical experts in the industries concerned but provided the business judgment and organisation and they thus came to be regarded as experts in the art of management. The spirit of expansion was strong upon these pioneers but not their own resources were always sufficient to finance all the new enterprises which they visualised. They were anxious, therefore, to take in outside capital—and yet there were practically no Indians with the necessary industrial experience or knowledge to take over that share in control which normally goes with capital ownership. Even if such Indians had existed, it is possible that the British sense of racial superiority, which became acute after the middle of the century, would have prevented British merchants from trusting Indian directors and managers. In point of fact, however, no such Indians existed. Mughal economic policy had effectively prevented the growth of a prosperous, commercially minded middle class like that from which the manufacturers of England were drawn. The problem of the British merchants, therefore, was to take in Indian capital if it could be secured, and yet retain control themselves.

The Managing Agency System was the solution to this problem. A British partnership or firm would float a company to run a new project and would itself put up most of the capital. When the new concern had paid a profit for some years, Indian investors would be attracted. The British would then sell part of their interests, though generally retaining a sufficient share to give them practical predominance and at the same time they would secure a Managing Agency agreement. The agreement might be either perpetual or for a long term and would give effective control to the managing agent. With the capital released by this transaction, the managing agent would then take up another new project. In the meantime the British promoters would have borne the early risk, which at that time Indian investors were not willing to take.

After several transactions of this kind, the British partnership or firm would find itself managing a number of independent companies and would thus develop considerable managerial expertise. Moreover, the fact that each of the managed companies might be concerned with a different industry was a source of strength. A jute company would buy coal from the same managing agent’s colliery, but both these companies might supply a tea company controlled by the same agent.

When a few Managing Agencies had acquired a reputation for sound management and integrity, companies other than those promoted by them began to come under their management. An Englishman, for example, who wished to retire from India would be only too glad to form a company—perhaps selling and taking out of the country part of his capital—and leaving control in the hands of a reliable British managing agent. Or again, as Indians became more investment-minded, a small group of them might plan a new industry. They then had to face two difficulties. In the first place, it might be extremely hard for them to find a competent manager; and, secondly, the limited investing public might have insufficient confidence in the promoter, or insufficient knowledge of the potentialities of the enterprise. Both difficulties were overcome by the appointment of a managing agent, who could provide the managerial skill and experience and in whom the public would have confidence.

The system was thus very economical of the limited supply of managerial ability and, indeed, made up for the lack of Indian industrial leaders. At the same time, because the big agency houses commanded public confidence, it greatly stimulated the growth of industry. Factors similar to those which led to the development of the British Managing Agencies in Calcutta also resulted in the growth of a similar system in Indian hands in Bombay. Development there may be regarded as an imitation of what had been done by the British in Calcutta, but a sounder view would seem to be that similar factors produced similar results. The public were not interested in commercial investment and the attempt of a few rich and enterprising men to employ the limited available managerial skill led naturally to the Managing Agency System.

As a method of promoting companies and bringing about industrial expansion, the system was an undoubted success. In Calcutta, Indian capital was not forthcoming on the scale required for the development of industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Progress depended upon British capital and a system which left control in the hands of a reputable British managing agent attracted that capital to India. Moreover, the great success of industrial enterprise under the control of the managing agents gradually taught the Indian public the meaning and value of the joint stock system. In Bombay a similar part was played by a few wealthy Hindus and Parsees, and, although some of the smaller agencies there indulged in doubtful and get-rich-quick methods—such as promising contracts to those who invested in the company or buying unsuitable machinery from manufacturers who took shares in it—the system produced the remarkable growth of cotton mills and other industries in a short space of time.

Besides managing the companies concerned, the managing agents have often had to lend them considerable financial support either by way of loans and advances or by guaranteeing their bank overdrafts. Many important companies in India were at that time undercapitalised and had to depend considerably on borrowing for current, and particularly seasonal, needs. While the new companies were in their infancy, direct borrowing would often have been difficult and expensive but the great Managing Agencies were able to borrow cheaply and thus to lend money to the companies at rates which were generally 1 or 2 per cent above bank rates. In times of difficulty, however, they frequently lent money to the managed companies at considerably below the prevailing rates of interest. Evidence was given the Indian Tariff Board in 1927 of instances where managing agents had placed large sums at the disposals of the managed companies at 6 per cent at a time when money could not be had for anything less than 8 per cent. In other cases, which were proved before the Tariff Board, the managing agents had been willing to use every penny of their own resources to prevent collapse of the companies under their charge. The financial support of the managed companies is, indeed, one of the recognised functions of the managing agent, and its value in the case of young companies can hardly be exaggerated. In times of depression this support becomes even more important, and Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas, a great industrialist who was not himself a managing agent, told the Indian Tariff Board in 1927 that ‘but for the Managing Agency System you would have had thirty mills in liquidation today’.

The Managing Agencies are the hard core of British business in India even today, and an understanding of the system is vital to any true appreciation of the impact of British commerce on that country. It seems worth while, therefore, to give a sketch of the formation of a typical Managing Agency. The following account is taken from a private paper written by one who himself had great experience of this system.

An Indian gentleman, having inherited land believed to be coal-bearing, seeks the help of a Managing Agency firm, which is already interested in a number of collieries, to develop it. The land is surveyed first by one of the Managing Agency’s senior mining engineers and then by an independent expert, and the result is favourable. The Managing Agency then draws up plans and estimates for the provision of machinery, the sinking of the pits and the subsequent working of the colliery. The proprietor finds himself unable to put up the necessary capital. The Managing Agency, therefore, floats a new colliery company, to which the proprietor transfers his property in return for shares. Discussion then takes place as to whether the remaining shares should be made into a public issue or should be taken up by the Managing Agency concerned, and it is ultimately decided that the Managing Agency firm and a few friends should take them up. The Managing Agency firm is at the same time appointed as managing agent of the colliery company for fifteen years—since such an appointment for a period of more than twenty years is no longer legal.

It is agreed that the colliery company will pay for all machinery and plant as well as all operating expenses. Technical assistance will be provided at customary charges by the mining engineers and other technical staff of the managing agents—which will be much cheaper than if the colliery company maintained its own whole-time staff of men of the same high qualifications and calibre. The coal-sales department of the Managing Agency will, of course, handle the sales of coal or other products, along with similar sales of many other collieries. In return for all these managerial services, it is arranged that the managing agent will draw a remuneration consisting of a commission on profits and a monthly allowance for expenses of clerical staff and so forth.

All formalities connected with the formation of the colliery company are carried out by the managing agent, who usually keeps the accounts and statistical records of the company thereafter. It is also arranged, in this particular case, that the directors of the colliery company shall consist of a representative of the managing agent (as chairman), a representative of the proprietor and a nominee of the outside capital. The managing agent thus fulfils the threefold function of finance house, company secretary and technical consultant. As time goes on, extensions of the colliery require increased expenditure, and the managing agent provides the necessary funds by way of an overdraft at normal rates. In due course the colliery company earns profits and declares a dividend. The managing agent’s experts now prepare dividend warrants, answer shareholders questions and deal with the many taxation problems that arise. These various functions are performed all the better because the managing agent is carrying out similar duties for other companies, too, and can therefore afford to employ specialists. Thus one of the senior officers deals with taxation matters, another with purchase of stores, another with coal sales, and so on. The maximum economy of managerial skill and knowledge is thus attained.

The foregoing account conforms to a general pattern, of which there are many detailed variations. The dominant theme of them all is the provision of expert managerial skill. The obvious drawback to a system of this kind is the tremendous power it puts into the hands of the managing agents. If they are unscrupulous, there is little protection for the managed companies; and in recent years there have been many allegations of unscrupulous practices amongst the newer and smaller agencies, particularly in Bombay. The study of the abuses and their proposed remedies is beyond the scope of this book. We are only concerned with the generally admitted fact that the great Calcutta British managing agents have, on the whole, discharged their responsibilities honourably and zealously.

The Indian Industrial Commission of 1916–18, which included Indians of the calibre of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Sir D. J. Tata, stated that the managing agency system ‘is in many ways well adapted to present conditions in India, and has a far greater list of successes to its credit than can be shown by ordinary company management under individual managing directors’. The commission was much impressed by the ‘high financial prestige possessed by the better-class agency firms and by the readiness of the investing public to follow their lead, a position only reached . . . by a policy, extending over many years, of efficient management, cautious finance and watchful attention to the interests of client enterprises’.

The Commission went on to say that the Managing Agencies had, however, in some phases been unduly conservative and there is some substance in this complaint. Nevertheless, the best testimony to the value of the system is found in the remarkable growth of industry and commerce in India which it brought about. As a result of increased manufacture in India, between 1879 and 1907 the proportion of imports of manufactured articles fell from 65 per cent to 53 per cent of total Indian imports, while in the same period the proportion of manufactured exports to total exports rose from 8 per cent to 22 per cent. In that period India had ceased to be a pure agricultural country and become at least partially industrialised. The same tendency continued in the second decade of the twentieth century, with the difference that in the new expansion the emphasis was increasingly more on companies registered in India. The people of that country had now begun to believe in a Joint Stock system and companies registered in India rose from 1,728 in 1905 to 3,668 in 1919, with a more than proportionate increase in the capital employed. Coal production was trebled, jute goods production nearly doubled and exports of Indian manufactured articles trebled in the same interval. Soon after the end of that period India was recognised by the League of Nations as one of the eight most important industrial states of the world.

Whatever may have been the faults of the Managing Agency System, it wrought a mighty transformation in the economy of India, and much of the credit for that change must go to those British merchants who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, began to look round for new commercial worlds to conquer and invented the Managing Agency System as the weapon of their conquest.

The Managing Agency System was not the only British contribution to business organisation in India during the nineteenth century. Equally important was the development of banking on Western lines, and later of insurance. Since banking is an almost indispensable adjunct of trade, it goes without saying that in a country such as India, with a commercial background of many centuries, there was an active and adequate banking system long before the advent of the British. The acute French seventeenth-century observer Tavernier has much to say on this subject, as for example: ‘In India a village must be very small indeed if it has not a money-changer, called a Shroff, who acts as banker to make remittances of money and issue letters of exchange. . . . All the Jews who occupy themselves with money and exchange in the empire of the Grand Seigneur pass for being very sharp; but in India they would scarcely be apprentices to these Changers.’ We are told in the Imperial Gazeteer that the bankers ‘conducted large transactions in the chief commercial centres and at the courts of native rulers, to whom they sometimes acted in the capacity of Finance Ministers. Even in times of trouble and anarchy, their persons were usually respected. Their credit stood so high that their hundis (drafts) were regularly negotiable throughout the country and often beyond the bounds of India.’

These indigenous banks suffered from two defects. In the first place, an important part of their business consisted in lending money at astonishingly high rates of interest to agriculturists who could never hope to repay the principal except by the sale of their land. Secondly, the system was built almost entirely on the credit of particular individuals, such as the famous Jagath Seth or Harry Kissan Das who did most of the Company’s banking business in the time of Warren Hastings.

The political instability and the economic uncertainty of the middle of the eighteenth century seriously affected many of these indigenous banks, and even bankers of undoubted integrity not infrequently failed to pay their dues. They were, indeed, not so much bankers as moneylenders and proved quite unable to cope with the new banking problems presented by the arrival in India of British and other European traders. These traders, therefore, found it necessary to make their own banking arrangements and this was done at a very early stage by the British Agency Houses which were established in Calcutta. The newcomers were also keenly interested in the internal trade, and they therefore found it necessary to build up trade connections with the indigenous bankers, which continued to be indispensable in the rural areas, while the English agency houses took care of the business of the ports and large towns. According to the report of the Indian Central Banking Committee the Agency House banks depended, in the first instance, largely on the savings of the East India Company servants, but they also ‘received deposits, made advances for the movement of crops and issued paper money . . . the banking business of the East India Company was entrusted to some of these concerns in Calcutta and Bombay.’

One of the first of these banks was founded in Bombay in 1720 with a capital of Rs.1 lakh advanced by the East India Company which exercised general supervision over it. According to the Bombay Gazeteer, its early years were far from prosperous and its management was unskilful. ‘Sums were lent on personal bond; no care was taken of the securities pledged; there was a debt of twenty years standing . . . houses mortgaged to the bank had fallen into decay before the account was settled.’ In 1770 the East India Company owed the bank a considerable sum and therefore authorised the bank to issue notes. Later the Company compounded for the amount due and in 1778 the bank came to an end.

In the meantime other European banks had come into existence. The Bank of Hindustan was founded in 1770 by a Calcutta Agency House and a little later the Bengal Bank and the General Bank were established. Two of these three banks failed to weather the crisis of the Mysore War and on the whole the combination of trade and banking was not a success. Next came the Presidency Banks, of which the Bank of Calcutta, afterwards known as the Bank of Bengal, was the first. The initiative in the founding of this bank was taken by Henry St. G. Tucker, Accountant-General, who pointed out, firstly, that the businessmen of Calcutta needed a bank, and, secondly, that in the absence of such an institution the Government had to raise money by Treasury Bills, which often had to be sold at a heavy discount. The Government of India therefore agreed to subscribe one-fifth of the capital of the new bank and to participate in its control. The bank was opened in 1806, but restrictions were imposed on individual stock holdings and on advances and on rates of interest. It was laid down that there must be a cash reserve of at least one-third of the liabilities payable on demand.

The Bank of Bombay was established in 1840 for ‘receiving deposits, keeping cash accounts, discounting bills and so on’, and until 1862 for issuing bank notes. Like all the Presidency banks, it was excluded from dealing with foreign exchange. The Bank of Madras was founded in 1843, and it is interesting to note that here, as in all the Presidency banks, the majority of the shares were subscribed by Europeans. In 1862 the Presidency banks ceased to have the right to issue bank notes, and in 1876 the Government of India ceased to be shareholders and to nominate directors.

In 1835 the coinage of the country was unified and the indigenous banks were much weakened by the loss of the important business of money changing. From 1840 onwards there was considerable development of joint stock banking in India, but in the absence of any control either by the Government or by public opinion, many of these banks failed to follow sound principles. Advances were given on inadequate security to persons who occupied positions of authority in the bank. Thus Findlay Sherras tells us in Indian Finances and Banking that a particular firm represented in the directorate of the Union Bank owed the bank 25 per cent of the entire capital of the bank. Another firm, also represented in the directorate, owed a sum equal to the equivalent of 16⅔ per cent of the capital. Again the same authority quotes the case of the Benares Bank: ‘It was established with a capital of Rs.5 lakhs raised by the sale of 1,000 shares of Rs.500 each. Rs.250 was paid up by instalments and by borrowing the amount from the bank on the security of its own scrip. When unable to call up the full price of the shares, the bank determined to issue new shares. By 1848 the number of shares was 6,000 which gave the nominal capital of Rs. 15 lakhs, of which no more than Rs.9 lakhs were ever paid up. A considerable amount of this sum consisted in loans from the bank. The Directors purchased their stock with money from the bank. When the stock was selling in the market at from 30 per cent to 50 per cent discount the Directors purchased in the stock of their friends at par and cancelled the shares. Nearly the whole capital was invested in the Ganges Steam Navigation Co. from which it could never have been withdrawn.’ The fact is that the climate of strict financial orthodoxy in which alone banking can develop healthily did not exist in India and it is not surprising that many of these Indian joint stock banks, whether British or Indian controlled, were unable to survive. Up to the end of the century joint stock banking in India had not made satisfactory progress.

A far better pattern was provided by the United Kingdom banks operating in India. In the ’thirties of the last century ‘systematic attempts were being made in England to complete the chain of Empire banks by the inclusion of India especially as the popularity of overseas investment in general was increasing with the return of prosperity after the Napoleonic War’. The East India Company resisted these attempts partly because they feared that the proposed new bank ‘would make a profit at their expense on their annual remittances for home expenditure’ and partly because the Bank of Bengal, in which the East India Company was financially interested, claimed that it could do all that the Company required. The Agency Houses joined the East India Company in opposing all such plans and the only United Kingdom bank which received the Royal Charter to operate in India before 1853 was the Oriental Bank. This, in fact, was originally the West Indian Bank incorporated in India in 1842 and only transferred to the United Kingdom as the Oriental Bank in 1845. It obtained its Charter then from the Home Government and not from the East India Company and henceforth this became the new procedure, though for a time the East India Company contested its legality.

This development was most fortunate for India, for it meant that banking in India was to be developed by established British banking concerns thoroughly steeped in sound banking traditions. Indigenous banks were unable to cope with the growing needs of India, and if the United Kingdom banks had not intervened India’s banking system would have been developed and controlled by Agency Houses who were primarily interested in trade rather than banking.

The great developments in Indian banking that have taken place in the twentieth century are outside the scope of this book, but it is sufficient to say that the wild speculative banking that appeared to be a real danger early in the century has been brought under control and that healthy development is now taking place. This is in no small measure due to the model of sound banking provided by the United Kingdom banks operating in India and to the availability of British banking legislation as a pattern for India. In no sphere of economic activity has British influence and example been more potent and more beneficial than in that of banking.

Chapter XLIX

Industrial and Financial Policy in India Under the Crown

It is now necessary to turn back to the field of official activity and to examine how far the growth of industry and commerce in India was influenced by governmental policy as regards industrial development, tariffs and finance.

We have already seen that the rise of the power of the East India Company coincided with a decline in Indian industry as a result of political chaos and currency confusion, as well as with the emergence of new competitive forces generated by the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The object of the Company was to exchange the manufactured goods of England for the products of India and it did not much matter to the Company whether those products were raw or manufactured. Profitable exports were not always easy to come by and the Company therefore found it necessary from time to time to introduce and support new manufactures. Most of these experiments were premature and failed, and according to the Indian Industrial Commission ‘these failures strengthened the erroneous idea that tropical countries with their naturally fertile lands and trying climate were suited to the production of raw materials rather than to manufacture’.

By the middle of the nineteenth century laissez-faire ideas had become thoroughly established in England and these were strengthened in their application to India by the success of the textile industries which had developed there without special help from the Government. Moreover, this trend was facilitated by the disappearance of the East India Company. As a great trading corporation, that body had naturally been concerned to develop Indian production even when that involved a conflict of interest with the manufacturers of Britain. British manufacturers soon became alarmed at the growth of the Indian textile industry, and from 1858 they found themselves in a stronger position to influence Indian policy. Genuine economic theory and frankly selfish considerations thus combined to lay down a policy under which ‘the efforts of the State were concentrated on the improvement of communications and on facilitating the flow of trade which continued . . . to consist mainly of export of Indian raw materials and import of foreign manufactured goods.’ This might not much have mattered if the spirit of the Industrial Revolution had then operated strongly in India. This, however, was not the case except for a small group of industrialists in Bombay, and India rapidly fell behind the rest of the world in industrial development.

The first public attention was called to this fact by the Famine Commission of 1880. That Commission considered that as a protection against the consequences of famine the Government should ‘aid in fostering the inception of new industries’ and introduce scientific methods of production in existing industries. The Government were urged to carry out experiments to ‘guide and educate private trade’ and to assist persons desiring to develop a new industry, by obtaining for them technical advice and information. They were also advised to buy their own requirements from local markets rather than from Europe wherever possible. Beyond this the Government should not go and the Famine Commission were at pains to state the orthodox laissez faire principle: ‘Otherwise than as above indicated, we do not think it desirable that the Government should directly embark in any manufacture or industry in an experimental way. Such experiments to be really successful or valuable must be carried out on a commercial basis. The conditions of any Government undertaking are rarely such as to give it this character, and the fear of incurring an undue expenditure on what is regarded as only an experiment will often lead to failure, which will be none the less mischievous because it was thus caused.’

The Famine Commission need have had no fear that the Government would go too far in the direction of intervening in commerce. In fact, nothing of great practical importance was done to implement this portion of the Report and it was not until 1898 that any serious governmental attempt to stimulate industries was made. Shortly before that time the Periyar Dam had been completed and there was talk of utilising the surplus water power for the manufacture of aluminium by electrolytic processes. This talk came to nothing, but in 1898 it stimulated the interest of the Madras Government in the development of an aluminium industry. The experiments carried out by Chatterton, Superintendent of the Madras School of Arts, were highly successful. A considerable business, with subsidiary factories elsewhere, was built up, and in 1903, the experimental stage being at an end, the Madras Government sold their plant to the Indian Aluminium Company.

The Madras Government went steadily ahead with its policy of promoting industries. Hand-loom weaving, the manufacture of home leather and pump irrigation all received attention and the impulse soon spread to other provinces. The comprehensive mind of Lord Curzon readily grasped the importance of these activities and in 1905 an Imperial Department of Commerce and Industry was established.

Unfortunately, at this stage, opposition from two quarters was encountered. The Madras Europeans who strongly objected to governmental intervention in industry were overruled by the Government of India. The doctrinaire Lord Morley then took much the same line as the European business man and refused to sanction the proposal of the Indian Government for pioneering in the industrial field. He laid it down that ‘State funds may be expended upon familiarising the people with such improvements in the methods of production as modern science and the practice of European countries can suggest; further than this the State should not go, and it must be left to private enterprise to demonstrate that these improvements can be adopted with commercial advantage.’

His successor took a more practical view, but Lord Morley’s policy damped down any real development until the First World War. By that time Indian political leaders were clamouring for action by the Government to develop industry. The swadeshi movement, in which political and economic motives were blended in perhaps equal proportions, led to the establishment of many small factories for the manufacture of matches, umbrellas and other consumer goods. According to the authors of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report ‘many collapsed through some or all of the many ways of breakdown, which must be expected when patriotism is called upon to make good the want of business experience and hard practical training’.

As a result of the contrast between these failures and the remarkable progress of British business in India, the people, states the Report, ‘recognised their inability to carry out their own programme without the help and guidance of Government; and they confined themselves for the most part to pressing their claims for state assistance and for a policy of tariff discrimination against foreign imports’.

The First World War gave a new stimulus to the demand for industrialisation, and led to the appointment of the Indian Industrial Commission, which was able to draw on the experience of the Indian Munitions Board. The Commission found that ‘a powerful and well directed stimulus is needed to start the economic development of India along the path to progress. Such a stimulus can only be supplied by an organised system of technical financial and administrative assistance’.

The Commission, in fact, came to much the same conclusions as these reached by the Famine Commission nearly forty years earlier. This time, however, the climate of opinion was favourable to the reception of such recommendations. Laissez faire was now at an end and the development of industry was one of the most important responsibilities of the ministers in the new Provincial Governments.

In the hundred years before the First World War British industrialists had done much for the development of India’s resources, but the industrial record of the British Government in that period is not impressive. Except in the case of the cotton duties there was little that could be frankly called exploitation in the bad sense, and in spite of the popular Indian belief there is little evidence of any deliberate policy of sacrificing India to British interests. The true charge against the British Government is that the policy of laissez faire was carried too far and continued too long in a country to which it was not suited. Such a policy may produce excellent results in a land where capitalists are venturesome and technical skill abundant. In nineteenth-century India, moneyed men of the country—-with the exception of a small Bombay group—seemed to lack initiative, and technicians were almost entirely non-existent. Under such conditions the policy of laissez faire meant stagnation and continued poverty.

It is next necessary to consider the British Government’s Tariff Policy in India under the Crown. For some considerable time most imports had been subject to moderate revenue duties, with a considerable preference in favour of British goods. The Mutiny had thrown a serious strain on the Indian finances, and in 1859 to meet the deficit, the general rate of duty was raised from 5 per cent to 10 per cent, while the preference in favour of British goods was abolished. The increased duties were regarded as a temporary evil, and in 1862, in view of the improved financial position, the duty on cotton piece-goods was reduced to 5 per cent and on yarn to 3½ per cent. In 1864 the general rate of duties was lowered to 7½ per cent, and in 1867 additional articles were placed on the free list. In pursuance of the same policy of reduction of duties where possible, in 1875 the Government of India abolished the duty on many articles and reduced the general rate from 7½ per cent to 5 per cent. They nevertheless retained the existing duty on cotton piece-goods and yarn, which in Lord Northcliffe’s opinion was so small that it could not be protective in its character.

The Lancashire textile manufacturers were now alarmed at the rapid growth of the Indian cotton-mill industry. They memorialised the Secretary of State, particularly emphasising the danger that by the duty-free import of Egyptian and American raw cotton the Indian mills would be able to manufacture the finer yarn and cloth and undersell British imports. Thus ‘a protective trade in cotton manufacture is springing up in British India to the disadvantage both of India and Great Britain’. A few months later the Manchester men again returned to the charge and drew the attention of the Government to the fact that ‘a large number of new mills are now being projected’. After a long and unhappy correspondence, during the course of which Lord Northcliffe resigned, the new Viceroy, Lord Lytton, was directed to secure the abolition of the import duty on coarse cotton goods. The majority of the Viceroy’s Executive Council voted against such an abolition and stated bluntly that it would be regarded in India as a deliberate sacrifice of India’s interests to those of Manchester. Lord Lytton took the very unusual step of overruling his Council, and although the majority of the Secretary of State’s advisers were also opposed to abolition the Manchester men had their way.

Other import duties were also abolished, and from 1882 to 1894 India was, except for an export duty on rice, virtually a land of free trade. In 1894 increased expenditure and a decline in the value of the rupee created fresh financial problems for India and the Herschell Committee recommended the reimposition of import duties. The recommendation was implemented in 1894, but cloth goods continued to be admitted duty free until a few months later, when increasing budgetary difficulties compelled the Secretary of State to impose a 5 per cent duty on cotton piece-goods and yarn. Lest this might have any protective effect, a countervailing excise duty was levied on cotton yarn of counts higher than 20. Even this did not satisfy the British manufacturers, who claimed that Indian goods made from Indian yarn paying a 5 per cent excise duty could undersell British goods paying a 5 per cent import duty, but this view was not supported by British business men in India. Mr. Playfair, speaking for British business in Calcutta, denied that there was any real competition between Britain and India in coarse cotton goods and also pointed out that ‘the power loom spindles in India amounted to one twenty-fifth and the power looms in India to one sixtieth of the world’s supply’. Nevertheless Lancashire manufacturers were persistent, and in 1896 the import duty on cotton piece-goods was lowered to 30 per cent, while an excise duty at the same rate was levied on all Indian mill-woven cloth, coarse or fine. At the same time, the import duties on cotton yarn were removed.

No one today would defend the action of the Secretary of State in surrendering to pressure from Manchester, and Tariff Policy in respect of cotton piece goods and yarn provides the one shameful example of the sacrifice of Indian to British interests after the assumption of power by the Crown. Fortunately the action taken produced little practical effect. The Indian cotton mills continued to multiply and between 1879 and the end of the century exports of cotton manufactures, expressed in terms of rupees, were almost doubled. Indefensible though the action of the British Government was, the quantum of protection involved was trifling and its abolition had little effect.

The Tariff fixed in 1896 was substantially unchanged until the First World War and India was in this period almost a free-trade country. Whether the resulting advantage of the free-trade policy to the consumer outweighed the hypothetical effect on the development of Indian interest in industry or not, will remain a matter of dispute for all time. The judgment of the writer is that India’s moneyed men had not, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, reached the stage when they were ready to embark on industrial development. Free trade was probably then the most beneficial policy for India in spite of its powerful advocacy by Lancashire. By the time of the First World War new economic and psychological factors were at work. India was now determined to develop her industries and this new attitude led to the policy of ‘discriminating protection’ which was undoubtedly right in the circumstances of post-war India. On the whole a fair judgment probably is, that the free-trade policy imposed on India in the second half of the nineteenth century was beneficial, but that the change to a policy of qualified protection might with advantage have come a little earlier than it in fact did.

Once India had become politically conscious the important thing was that she should settle her own fiscal policy. This fact was fully recognised by the authors of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report and led to the Fiscal Autonomy Convention of 1921, according to which it was laid down that ‘the Secretary of State should as far as possible avoid interference on this subject (the subject of tariffs) when the Government of India and the Legislature are in agreement’. His Majesty’s Government thus gave up to India their authority over this important branch of administration twenty-six years before the transfer of power.

It is not possible here to discuss in detail the financial and taxation policy of the Crown in India, and reference need only be made to one or two of its principal features. The Public Debt when the East India Company came to an end was £69,500,000 and the cost of British troops employed in India during the Mutiny brought it up to a little more than £100,000,000. After the Mutiny the financial situation for a while improved, largely because of the increased revenue resulting from the development of communications and the stimulus to commerce and industry. In 1867 the Government of India accepted the policy of financing productive public works by borrowed money and the debt naturally began to rise. By 1876 it had risen to nearly £139,000,000, but of the increase of £39,000,000, £24,000,000 had been spent on account of railways and irrigation. A second cause of increase was the employment of Indian troops, in what are regarded by Indians as imperial wars—for example, in Afghanistan, China, Persia and Abyssinia. It is difficult to decide in the abstract whether this expenditure should have been charged to India or not. Indians argue that these wars were not fought for India’s benefit but largely for imperial interests. Against this it may be contended that India’s position in the Empire gave her unprecedented security and that it was reasonable that she should take her part in the defence of the imperial system which protected her. If an impartial tribunal today examined all expenditure of this kind, it would perhaps conclude that part but not all of it should have been charged to India. As regards the other item in the increase of the debt—expenditure on public works—few Indians today would agree with R. C. Dutt in condemning the financing of productive works by borrowing. It was that policy alone that made possible the rapid development of India.

From about 1873 new adverse factors were operative. The rupee declined in value from 28⅛d. in 1871–2 to 20¾d. in 1877, and thence to 14½d. in 1893–4, while at the same time India suffered from a number of exceptionally severe famines. Moreover, as has been seen earlier, import duties were decreased in 1875 and practically abolished in 1882. The debt thus rose to nearly £197,000,000 sterling by 1893. Thereafter conditions began to improve and annual deficits were turned into surpluses by the beginning of the twentieth century. This period was, however, one of great constructive activities financed by borrowing and stimulated early in the century by Lord Curzon’s dynamic personality. The public debt necessarily increased rapidly. The First World War was a period of regular budget deficits which necessitated further borrowing, and in addition to this India made a gift of £100,000,000 to Britain as a contribution towards the cost of the war.

By 1931 the interest-bearing obligations of the Government of India amounted to £870,000,000 sterling. In his article on ‘Public Finance’ in Modern India Lord Meston has shown that ‘India’s debt in fact has been for the most part incurred in building up and developing public utility enterprises of a productive nature, the profits from which not only covered the full interest charges but in addition have yielded a substantial benefit to the state’. In the following table Lord Meston shows that the liabilities of the Government of India in 1931 were covered by interest-yielding assets to the extent of 80 per cent.

Capital Advanced	£ millions
To railways	559
To other commercial depts	17.5
To provinces (irrigation works past and present, loans to local bodies and advances to agriculturalists, etc.	111.8
To Indian states and other interest-bearing loans	14.7
Total interest-bearing assets	703.0

India has reasonable grounds for complaint with regard to the inclusion of some important items in her national debt, but the impartial conclusion must be that they are small compared with the magnificent and profitable public works which have been built up in India under British rule, as a result of the policy of financing productive works by borrowed money.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the annual expenditure of the Government of India rose from £51,000,000 to over £100,000,000. This has frequently led to charges of extravagance and of oppressive taxation. Such complaints ignore the fact that when the rule of the Company ended large tracts of the country were virtually unadministered. No proper police system existed; communications were so bad that in many areas wheeled traffic was unknown; famine relief was haphazard and hopelessly inadequate; and in fact India was still a mediaeval country. During the next fifty years India was equipped with a first-class administration, a good police force, good communications except in a few areas, and all manner of nation-building departments—and expenditure inevitably rose. It has been calculated that if we exclude payment for services rendered by the railways, the post office and the irrigation department, the total incidence of taxation in India including Land Revenue amounted in 1931 to 8s. 10d. per head per annum. At the same time Mr. V. K. R. V. Rao estimates that the percentage of income in India was £3 12s. for rural and £12 3s. for urban inhabitants with an average of £4 13s. per capita for the whole population. Revenue thus amounted to little more than 9 per cent per capita. The corresponding figure for the United Kingdom was nearly 21 per cent, exclusive of local rates. The biggest single item in the budget continued to be defence. In the article quoted above Lord Meston has calculated that India’s defence expenditure (before the Second World War) was about 35s. 6d**. per head of the population—and he states that of the sixty largest nations in the world India had the lowest percentage of military manpower of the population.

It is not suggested that comparisons of this kind can have any scientific validity. The figures are only quoted to show that critics should be cautious in stigmatising British administration as extravagant, or in alleging that India was financially bled white to maintain a vast army. The truth appears to be that after the early mistakes of the Company had been rectified, the British rulers of India seized every opportunity to reduce taxation. Income tax introduced in an emergency was dropped in 1872²⁸; provincial rates originally imposed to pay for the Famine Insurance Scheme were gradually dropped or devoted to local purposes; customs duties, as we have seen, were reduced and then abolished when the financial position permitted. There is, indeed, ground for thinking that the Government of India were too conservative in their Indian taxation policy and that important departments on which the economic development of the country depended were thus at times starved. This conservatism may have been unavoidable on the part of a foreign government, but at least it laid firm financial foundations for the self-governing India that was to come.

Chapter L

The Economic Effects of British Rule

We are now in a position to generalise as to the economic effects of British rule, and this can conveniently be done under four heads, namely, the change in the economic pattern of the country, the increase in productivity, the growth of population and the change in the standard of living.

The most important elements in the pre-British economic pattern were the self-sufficient villages in which the vast majority of the people lived and which, unless they happened to be centres for the export of luxury goods, were almost solely insulated from the economics of the outside world. In each village there were cultivators who grew practically all that the village required in the way of food or materials for clothes; artisans who prepared the ploughs, utensils and furniture in return for a share of the village produce; barbers and other village servants who received their traditional share of grain; ‘banias’ who advanced seed or grain to cultivators in time of need; and priests who attended to the religious and cultural needs of the community and whose maintenance was a common responsibility. If a village was deficient in some particular necessity or in a customary amenity, it would obtain it by barter from another village perhaps three or four miles distant. Thus the real economic unit was the group of villages. The only financial transactions with the outside world were those connected with the payment of revenue, and as they were frequently effected in kind, money was ‘only a store of value, not a medium of exchange’.

Economic life was thus essentially static, and, as Radha Kamal Mukerjee writes of backward villages, even to this day ‘there is no desire for a better or comfortable living, both among the cultivators as well as among the artisans. The artisans follow their hereditary occupation, there is no competition, no stimulus for improvement, no change in customary wages. The industries are stereotyped; the apprentice only tries to imitate his master and rarely thinks of introducing new implements or new methods of manufacture. Thus the village communities are the most complete and the most contented in the world’. There were, of course, larger centres of trade here and there—places of bustle where precious metals, works of art and other costly articles were prepared for export to foreign countries or for the imperial court, but they were not sufficiently numerous to dominate the pattern or change the static character of Indian life. That character was indeed the result, not only of historical forces, but also of the absence of communications throughout vast areas of the country. Villages had to be self-sufficient, since the roads along which commodities might have been brought from distant places did not exist.

This way of life was bound to be changed by the advent of the British. Energetic traders, determined to buy and to sell, were followed by earnest administrators actuated by more than the old Roman zeal for building good means of communication. New commodities were brought within the reach of the villages, and as the nineteenth century went on new wants were constantly created. ‘Mill-made piece-goods not only of foreign but of Indian manufacture . . . cheapened the price of cloth . . . and enormously extended its use by the poorer classes.’ Imported sugar took the place of gur, brass and copper utensils became so cheap as to be available for common use; while cheap trinkets and consumer goods of many kinds began to be on sale in the villages. The improvement of communications not only made it easier for villages to export surplus produce in order to pay for these new wants, but also put an end to the need for self-sufficiency. Cultivators could now afford to grow the most valuable crops for which their lands were suited, buying their own essential requirements from elsewhere. Specialisation of cultivation by areas thus developed. Cotton, which used to be grown everywhere, began to be cultivated only in the most suitable areas; sugar cane cultivation similarly began to be localised; while many peasants in East Bengal found it paid them to grow jute and buy rice. Gradually a money economy began to take the place of the old system based on barter and communal self-sufficiency.

This change is by no means complete yet, but it operates more strongly every year, and has had a twofold effect. On the one hand, it has facilitated economic progress and the accumulation of possessions. On the other hand, it has made the village more dependent than formerly on the outside world. Today, a slump in world commerce may impoverish the jute-growers of Bengal, or an exceptional demand for cotton may make the fortune of a Gujerat village. It is not possible for an illiterate cultivator to cope with the problems of marketing under the new conditions, and the bania or trader thus plays a more important part than of old. He is not, as is sometimes suggested, a parasite, for the cultivator could not do without him, but he is able to intercept much of the profit on the export of village produce so that the cultivator often derives little benefit from this new potential wealth.

As a result of the transition to a money economy the position of the village artisan has been fundamentally changed. He has in most cases lost the status of a village servant and works for cash payment in competition with the sellers of foreign goods. Hand industries in general have declined in spite of attempts to revive them during the last thirty years and many craftsmen have found it necessary to migrate to the towns in search of work. At the same time, the growing density of population and the fragmentation of holdings has made life in the villages increasingly difficult and many of the most enterprising members of all classes tend to leave their villages in search of the many opportunities afforded by the growth of administration and the development of industry. This fact is well illustrated by the case of Bikrampur, one of the wealthiest districts of East Bengal of which it is said that its principal industry is the consumption of the money orders remitted home by the many Bikrampuris who work in Bengal Government offices. This withdrawal from village life of so large a proportion of the intelligentsia has still further strengthened the unprogressive character of the villages and in many rural areas today one is oppressed with a sense of stagnation.

On the other hand, there is an abounding vitality about the great industrial towns that have grown up in the last century. This new urban life is, indeed, one of the chief results of British rule. There were, of course, many large towns in Mughal India, but most of them grew up round the court of the emperor or of a great noble and all their activities were directed to satisfying the needs of that court. There was in them no class comparable to the men of commerce, the industrialists, the bankers, the lawyers, the doctors and the other professional men who constitute the upper classes of Calcutta and Bombay today. Spiritually this class is the product of Western influences and the reaction against them, but from the economic angle, with which we are now concerned, they are seen as the result of the breakdown of the old village self-sufficiency and of the creation of British forms of commerce, industry and administration. The Indian upper middle classes who for a century have shaped India’s political and economic thought and who today rule India are indeed the most evident sign of the changes wrought by the British in the economic pattern of India. Unfortunately they are not the only products on India of British urban civilisation and nowhere in the world is there poverty and squalor more appalling than that to be found in Calcutta or Cawnpore or many other Indian industrial towns. If Britain is to take the credit for industrial and political development, she must equally take the blame for not seriously tackling the problem of the Indian slums.

The next most important economic effect of British rule has been the remarkable increase in productive capacity, both agricultural and industrial. There are, unfortunately, no statistics with which to calculate the total agricultural yield in the pre-British period, and the absence of such figures at one time gave rise to much loose talk of a decline in the fertility of the soil. Except in certain areas where erosion or desiccation has taken place there is no reason whatsoever to believe in any such decline, and Moreland, in the most careful analysis of the whole subject yet made, has shown its improbability. We may safely accept his conclusions that the average yield per acre of Bengal and Upper India was somewhat higher in the time of Akbar than today, while in the intervening country it was much lower. As regards South India there are no data from which a judgment can be formed.

On the other hand, the area under cultivation has greatly increased in British times, particularly in the East Gangetic plain, where there is reason to believe that four-fifths of the land was uncultivated even in the palmiest days of the Mughal Empire. Vast forests have been felled and made available for agriculture; greater security from enemies as well as from wild beasts makes cultivation possible in extended areas; while the provision of means of transport makes it worth while to till land previously regarded as unprofitable. More important than any of these factors has been the construction of great irrigation works which, as we have already seen, have transformed deserts into fertile lands. The extension of cultivation has gone on continuously even in modern times, and between 1900 and 1930 alone the area under cultivation increased by about 15 per cent. The scanty available evidence suggests that the average yield per head was about the same at the time of Akbar as it is today; and since population in the sixteenth century was probably about a hundred million it is reasonable to guess that the total agricultural production has thus increased fourfold during British rule. Part of this increase must be regarded as the inevitable result of the growth of population, but a considerable part of it must be attributed to the creation of favourable political conditions and to the provision of communications and irrigation.

As regards the even greater increase in industrial production, it has already been seen that in the nineteenth century the impulse for development came mainly from British industrialists, and that in the exceptional case of the cotton industry British managers and technicians played a dominant part in the early years. In the twentieth century the important long-term effects of British influence began to be felt. The example set by Jamsetjee Tate was followed by many others and new Indian industries began to spring up rapidly, while Indians began also to acquire an increasing share in the steel, jute and other industries. Today the steel, cotton, jute, sugar, match and cement industries are mainly Indian-owned and rapid progress is being made by Indians in the electrical and engineering industries. This great industrial growth was indeed recognised when India was given representation on the Council of The International Labour Organisation as one of the eight chief industrial countries of the world. British example has in fact made India industry-minded and has largely broken down her suspicion of the joint stock system and her fear of new enterprises. While there is not much foundation, except in one or two important instances already recounted, for the belief that the British Government tried to hamper India’s industrial development, it would be equally wrong to give the British Government the credit for having deliberately planned or greatly stimulated the economic advance that has taken place. The truth would appear to be that while the British Government provided the conditions—security, good administration, good communications—in which alone such developments could take place, the impulse was provided by the example of British business men, by contact through Britain with the outside world and by the Indian nationalism of the present century. The result of the impulse was the rapid increase in productivity to which we have referred.

Another important result of the conditions produced by British rule in India is the rapid growth of population, which is clearly linked both as cause and effect with the increase in agricultural and industrial productivity. Hindu social customs, including early marriage and the rarity of the single state, are a factor in this growth, but there is no reason to think that they produced any similar effect in pre-British times. Population was then kept down by pestilence, heavy infant mortality, and perhaps also by famine, though there is some ground for believing that catastrophes such as famine do not permanently affect the growth of population, since their effect is counteracted by excessive births after the catastrophe—the logistic curve as it were takes a jump. If this is so, British success in dealing with famine cannot be regarded as a contributory cause of the great increase in population of the last century. Of the effect of continually recurring pestilences and high infant mortality in reducing population there can be no doubt and here the British rulers were able, in the last fifty or sixty years of their rule, to make available to India the resources of Western science.

The results achieved were considerable, particularly in respect of smallpox and cholera. It is true that the mortality of those diseases in India between 1929 and 1937 was much higher than in most other countries and that both general and infant mortality rates in India for the same period were greater than in Ceylon, Java or Japan. Nevertheless, birth rates in India have always been high and the reduction in mortality effected by British medical and public health measures has been sufficient to result in a large excess of births over deaths and has rapidly increased the population.

Of recent years this phenomenon has greatly complicated Indian economic problems, particularly in regard to food grains, production of which can hardly keep pace with the growing demand. The most enlightened Indian leaders today regard some restriction of population growth as an urgent necessity, but Hindu feeling is against any form of birth control, and in any case the low educational standards of the country militate against its acceptance. Whether the rapid growth of population is to be regarded as presenting a major and perhaps insoluble problem, or as a characteristic of a dynamic and progressive people is a matter of controversy. In either case it must be recognised as a legacy of British rule.

A comparative study of the standard of living in India today and in Mughal times would form a fitting conclusion to this chapter; unfortunately the materials for any such scientific survey do not exist. Neither in the Ain-i-Akbari or other Indian records, nor in the accounts of foreign visitors, are there any data from which we can even roughly estimate national wealth or per capita income in pre-British India. All we can do is to form general impressions. All contemporary observers agree as to the appalling poverty of the masses of Mughal India. Linschoten, writing in the sixteenth century, tells us that the people ‘lived very poorly, go naked and are so miserable that for a penny they will endure to be whipped and they eat so little that it seems as if they live by the air’. DeLaet, writing a little later reports that ‘the condition of the common people in this region is exceedingly miserable’—and, indeed, almost every traveller in India at that time testifies to the same effect.

This, however, does not help us a great deal, for even today an observant visitor to India receives the same impression of appalling poverty in the towns and to a lesser extent amongst the landless labourers in the villages. There are, however, some respects in which it is fairly clear that there has been improvement. In the first place, the masses are better clothed today than in the time of Akbar. There is complete agreement amongst all observers in the Mughal period that the clothing of the people even in Northern India, where the winters are cold, was completely inadequate. Again and again in the annals of the time reference is made to the nakedness of the people. A cold-weather visitor to Upper India today would not get that impression.

In housing, too, there has been considerable improvement, though this has not been uniform throughout the country. There are many areas such as East Bengal, where the semi-pukka tin-roofed houses in large numbers in the villages contrast markedly with the early travellers’ description of Indian villages. Almost equally striking is the improvement in household utensils as a result of the comparative cheapness of brass and metal in modern times.

In the absence of any useful economic data of the pre-British period it is impossible to estimate the degree of progress that has taken place or to speculate profitably as to whether more should have been achieved in two hundred years or not. We are concerned with the simple fact that an improvement in the amenities of life has taken place during the British period.

Moreland has studied this whole subject with great patience and erudition and it is perhaps worth while to quote his conclusions.

‘The upper classes, small in numbers and consisting largely of foreigners, enjoyed incomes which were very great relatively to reasonable needs, and as a rule they spent these incomes lavishly on objects of luxury and display. They did practically nothing towards promoting the economic development of the country, and such part of their income as was not spent was hoarded in unproductive forms. The single benefit resulting from their activities was indirect; their patronage of foreign merchants, dictated solely by the desire for novelty, in fact facilitated the opening of new channels of trade, and thus paved the way for economic developments in the future. Enjoying this patronage, the merchants on the coast adopted a somewhat similar style of living, but elsewhere it was dangerous for traders or men of business to indulge in open expenditure, and, like the rest of the middle classes, they lived inconspicuous and probably frugal lives. The great bulk of the population lived on the same economic plane as now; we cannot be sure whether they had a little more or a little less to eat, but they probably had fewer clothes, and they were certainly worse off in regard to household utensils and to some of the minor conveniences and gratifications of life, while they enjoyed practically nothing in the way of communal services and advantages. That is the picture itself: in the background is the shadow of famine, a word which has changed its meaning within the last century. In Akbar’s time, and long afterwards, it meant complete if temporary economic chaos, marked by features which, repulsive as they are, must not be left out—destruction of homes, sale of children into slavery, hopeless wandering in search of food, and finally starvation, with cannibalism as the only possible alternative. It is against this background that the splendours of Agra or Vijayanagar must be viewed.’

Beyond some general statement of this kind we cannot go, and we must content ourselves with asserting that the British economic impact on India has had a fourfold effect. It has introduced India to modern industrial and commercial methods; it has vastly expanded agricultural and industrial productivity and so increased the national wealth; it has stimulated a phenomenal growth of population; and it has probably made life a little more comfortable for the average man. It is scarcely too much to say that by the end of the period of British rule India has been well equipped for rapid economic progress, not only by reason of the material developments that have taken place, but still more because she had learnt the art of business and industrial management and had been strongly imbued with the scientific and industrial spirit of the West.

Chapter LI

Conclusion

In politics as in physical science, when one body impinges upon another the effect of the impact is determined not only by its force but also by its duration. Since, however, our own age wears for us the appearance of timelessness, we are apt to overlook this principle in our studies of contemporary or recent history, and British writers have thus tended to forget how short has been the duration of the British impact on India. In reality, most of India came under British rule only in the time of Wellesley or later, while by the beginning of the twentieth century nationalism was becoming the formative factor in Indian life and thought. The period during which British influence was paramount cannot, therefore, be reckoned at more than about a hundred years—short by comparison with the five hundred years of Muslim rule and a fleeting moment indeed in the long history of India. It might then seem improbable that so brief an interruption to the general course of Indian development should have left behind it many significant and permanent results.

The improbability becomes greater when we have regard to the highly developed and complex civilisation with which the British came into contact. That civilisation is an amalgam of two elements, one Hindu and one Muslim and at first sight the Islamic element might seem to offer the greater resistance to outside influence. The uncompromising character of Islam is obvious, and in consonance with it the Muslims in India for a considerable time resisted the impact of Western education, took but little to science or industry, and hardly allowed their beliefs or their way of life to be influenced by the newcomers. They remained a primarily agricultural people, and Pakistan today is perhaps much nearer than her great neighbour to the India of Akbar. Hinduism, on the other hand, has protected itself throughout the centuries by its flexibility and its absorptive capacity. It was not seriously affected, except in the realm of art, by protracted Greek and Persian influence; it emerged, modified, indeed, but with its identity unchanged, from centuries of Buddhist dominance; and it was not substantially influenced by either the blandishments or the tyranny of the Mughal emperors.

In the British period the Hindus, with their great sensitivity to new ideas and spiritual influences, have been profoundly affected by European thought. They have become steeped in the Western scientific spirit; they have so absorbed European political ideals as to forget their foreign origin; and they have allowed even their conception and understanding of their own history and philosophy to be transformed by Western learning. Nevertheless, modern India is essentially a Hindu country and during the latter half of the British period Hinduism itself, after centuries of stagnation, has experienced a mighty resurgence. Thus it is that independent India is today governed in the main, not by Westernised intellectuals, but by men who regard themselves first and foremost as Hindus.

Both the main elements in Indian life and thought are in fact highly self-protective and it might therefore have been thought that the relatively brief impact of British rule would leave little permanent mark. Nevertheless, some of the evident effects of that rule have at least the appearance of permanence. Our object in this concluding chapter will be to examine them and to consider whether that appearance is real or illusory.

Although European civilisation has sometimes been stigmatised by Indian writers as materialistic, it is, strangely enough, in the realm of ideas that British influence on India has been strongest. The most important illustration of that fact is to be found in the development of Indian nationality and the growth of Indian nationalism. India had for centuries possessed a marked cultural unity, but some dynamic force was needed to engender that group-consciousness and that communal pride on which nationality depends. That force was provided by British rule and it operated in three ways. In the first place, a strong and ubiquitous Central Government, administering a uniform system of law with a high degree of efficiency, relentlessly imposed a homogeneity unknown in Indian history. The Tamil, the Bengali, and the Gujarati for the first time obeyed the same law and observed the same forms in their dealings with authority; and in the process they were insensibly drawn closer together. Secondly, the introduction of English education brought the upper middle classes under the influence of Western thought at a time when nationalism was the most vital factor in the life of Europe, whilst at the same time the English language provided them with a common medium of communication. In the third place, the Press, which was called into being by British example and influence, furnished Indians with a means of voicing their political aspirations, and so developing a common consciousness and a knowledge of their growing strength.

In all these ways, whether individual British administrators liked it or not, British rule fostered the growth of national feeling and built up a political unity not wholly dependent on the cohesive force provided by a strong foreign rule. The process was clearly not complete by 1947 or partition would not have been necessary and it is an interesting speculation as to whether, if the steps to self-government had been slower, a unitary government would have been possible. The answer to this question is probably in the negative, for Islamic thought and custom were too clear cut to be absorbed by Hinduism, and the clash, leading to partition when foreign control disappeared, was perhaps inevitable. Nevertheless, the centripetal forces set in motion by the British were strong enough to ensure that the five hundred and sixty-two Indian states which had the right to claim independence on the transfer of power would in fact be merged into the Indian Union or into Pakistan and that both India and Pakistan would start from positions of stable equilibrium. On a long-term view neither country lacks fissiparous tendencies. It is not easy to see how East and West Pakistan, separated by over one thousand miles in distance, and inhabited by people who have nothing in common except their religion, can remain permanently united. It is equally difficult to feel sure that the strong demand for the creation of the Andhra and other linguistic provinces may not lead to the disintegration of India. These matters, however, are wholly hidden from present view and all that can now be said is that both countries show all the signs of stability.

The process of unification has not been wholly advantageous, for the development of a strong Central Government has undermined those village institutions in which the political genius of India was most truly displayed. The villages of ancient and mediaeval India were to a great extent self-governing and the forms of democracy which operated in them were perhaps more vital than those which have been so laboriously imposed on India in modern times. The community settled its affairs by common consent and looked for no interference from outside as long as the revenue due to the ruler was paid. Civic consciousness was strong, and the way of life in rural India was gracious. Despite the protests of the wisest administrators, the East India Company steadily destroyed the political importance of the villages, and few things in British rule are more pathetic than the attempts, during the last seventy years, to re-create village institutions. It is only necessary to study the working of a modern District or Union Board, for example in Bengal, to realise how much India has lost by the over-centralisation of authority. This loss must in fairness be set against the gain which has resulted from political unity.

Perhaps the next most important result of British rule is the new belief in the rule of law. The newness of this conception does not, indeed, mean that in ancient India men had no rights, for customary rights were strong and men were prepared to fight for them. They were, however, unenforceable except by rebellion, and neither in Hindu nor in Muslim India was there any forum in which a wronged subject could plead his cause against the ruler. Today the principle of the rule of law is so deeply entrenched in Indian hearts that even the mildest attempts of the executive to control the Press or to restrain frankly subversive activities are bitterly resented and the hostility which such acts can arouse is perhaps a stronger protection against arbitrary government than the guarantees of fundamental rights provided in the constitution. Even tyranny must now proceed according to the forms of law.

The rule of law and the principle of nationality do not logically depend on the existence of any particular form of government. The former of these two conceptions was indeed established in British India long before democratic institutions were contemplated; while the recent history of Europe has shown how effectively fervid nationalism can express itself through dictatorships. It is, indeed, to some extent an historical accident that the two ideas led in British India to the establishment of the parliamentary system. Of recent years there has been much discussion as to the suitability of that system to the political genius of the Indian people, and it has been said that in her dealings with India Britain confused self-government with responsible government. Bureaucracy, it is argued, is in the Indian tradition and independence should have been achieved through Indianisation of the Services rather than through exotic parliamentary institutions. The contention is academic, for the truth would appear to be that in the twentieth century it would have been psychologically impossible for Britain to confer, or for India to receive, self-government in any other than the parliamentary form. In recent years the parliamentary system has lost some of its moral authority in Britain, but in the formative years of modern British policy in India the great majority of the British public could not conceive of freedom except under democratic forms. Even Lord Morley, who stated dogmatically that he would have nothing to do with the establishment in India of responsible government in the technical sense, took for granted the appropriateness of the parliamentary system for politically advanced peoples, and when his successors accepted the right of India to full self-government there was never any doubt as to what form it would take. In the meantime, educated Indians had been thoroughly conditioned by British liberal thought of the nineteenth century and had, moreover, drawn inspiration from Mazzini and the other heroes of revolutionary Europe. Even those Indians who most doubted whether democracy could be made to fit into the social framework of India would have bitterly resented the establishment of any non-parliamentary form of government. They would have regarded it as a badge of inferiority, a sign that India was not really to be admitted to an equality with Britain and the world. They were, in fact, completely permeated with British political ideas and to those who concentrated their attention solely on politics it must have seemed that Britain’s spiritual conquest of India was complete. Many friends of India, nevertheless, doubted if this exotic plant would for long survive the transfer of power. Four years is too short a time in the life of a nation to form the basis of a prediction, but at the moment the parliamentary system seems firmly entrenched. Admittedly it is developing on lines rather different from those with which we are familiar in England and it may indeed be that our two-party pattern will not be reproduced in India. Nevertheless, all the present signs are that representative government has come to stay.

Although it is in the political sphere that the influence of British thought has been most spectacular, equally important has been the impact of Western science. India at an early stage made great contributions to scientific knowledge, but in the Middle Ages her intellectual life became stagnant and few signs of a true spirit of enquiry appeared. Nor did she experience anything even remotely comparable to that great revolution in ideas which was brought about in Europe by such men as Galileo, Newton and Descartes. Macaulay’s contemptuous diatribes against Indian learning were exaggerated and therefore unjust, but it was, nevertheless, true that, except to a limited extent in the field of astronomy, scientific learning was rare and the scientific spirit non-existent in the India of his day. Thanks partly to Macaulay’s own vehemence, English became the medium of instruction, and through that medium, by the end of the century, the scientific spirit had been rekindled. Indian students have not infrequently outstripped their Western teachers, and in the twentieth century the name of Jagadish Bose was to attest the position of India in the world of international science. The influences that brought about this mighty change—to find a parallel to which we must go back to the great days of Greece or Rome—were in a sense not British but European, but it was through British agency that they were brought to bear and they must surely be reckoned as an important aspect of the impact of the British.

The revolution in Indian scientific thought necessarily had its effect on other departments of learning. The pre-eminence attained by the classical Indian philosophers had been based on direct apprehension, sometimes of a mystical type, rather than on pure reason as it is generally understood in the West. To the average English reader, indeed, ancient Indian literature and philosophy appear to be characterised by an absence of the critical spirit and the place of analysis seems to be taken by elaborate classifications which are often little more than enumerations. The profundity of thought of many Sanskrit writers is nevertheless beyond dispute and the impression on the Western mind described above is evidence only of the great gulf between the mental approach of a modern European and that of the thinkers of ancient India. Today, however, educated Indians have completely assimilated Western modes of thought and expression, and European and Indian writers on political, economic or other subjects operate within the same framework of thought and even feeling. Western intellectual patterns have, in fact, become dominant, and the modern intellectual Indian is more at home with The Times and The Economist than with the Rig Veda. The change has not been wholly for the better, for it has given a materialistic twist to Indian thought and has introduced a worship of wealth which was not present in the India of the Vedas or the Epics. On the other hand, intellectual India has received a new dynamic impulse and has become once again creative. For good or for ill, Western scientific thought has conditioned the Indian approach to all the problems of life, whether practical or speculative.

The degree of conditioning, however, has not been uniform in all directions, and one of our most difficult problems is to determine how far Western influence has affected religious sentiment and philosophy. It may be said at once that Islam has been singularly unaffected and our question thus need only be considered in relation to Hinduism.

British influence has reacted on Hinduism principally in three ways. In the first place, it led a small but important section of highly educated Indians to abandon their traditional Hindu thought and feeling and to adopt a Western outlook on life and philosophy. They did not become either Christians or atheists, but they lost their attachment to Hinduism and in a sense had no spiritual roots. This group was for a time very influential, not only because it included some extremely able men and women, but also because the occidental habits of its members brought them into close touch with the British rulers of the country. An earlier generation of Englishmen had enjoyed familiar intercourse with Indians of the old school, but with the development of political consciousness a gulf opened between the two peoples and the only Indians on the British side of the gulf were those who had been largely Westernised. For this very reason, their influence diminished as nationalism grew and it has declined still further since the transfer of power. In their heyday, however, they had sown the seeds of doubt amongst those who did not completely follow their Westernising tendencies, and in the large cities of India today there are many who, without renouncing their Hinduism, have ceased to be deeply influenced by it. Modern education has, in fact, produced similar results in India and in Britain, and indifference is widespread.

A second effect of British influence, as we have seen, was the growth of re-formed sects such as the Brahmo Samaj, which aimed at a synthesis of the best in Hinduism and Christianity. They were of considerable importance in the nineteenth century, but, like the thorough-going occidentalists, they faded into the background in the twentieth century.

Far more important was the reaction produced on men who feared that their immemorial faith would be swept aside by newfangled ideas and so rose stoutly to its defence. They deeply felt the need of standing on the ancient ways, and the militant orthodoxy which they developed combined readily with—and indeed inspired—the new nationalism, to produce a mighty spiritual force. Thus, without in the least intending to do so, the British revivified Hinduism after its long period of stagnation and uncertainty. This close association of aggressive Hinduism with nationalism involves the danger that, if nationalism loses its fervour now that independence has been achieved, devotion to Hinduism may also decline. On the other hand, it is possible that the exuberance which follows liberation may lead India into a full-blooded imperialism and national self-consciousness may thus be still further strengthened.

Be this as it may, British influence has in fact produced both zealotry and indifference and they exist side by side in the cities, in proportions which, since enthusiasm is more vocal than neutrality, are difficult to determine. In the villages and smaller towns Hinduism remains strongly entrenched, but in the north of India there are, nevertheless, some signs of change. Here and there are groups of men who reject the old taboos on intercaste dining; while the respect paid to men of higher caste is not so profound or so universal as of old. Villagers no longer gather so frequently round the feet of the village pandits to hear the recitation of the great epics in which their traditions are enshrined. There is, in fact, a general loosening of the bonds of authority. These signs must be neither exaggerated or ignored. They do not indicate rapid or revolutionary change, but they do mean that life and thought in the villages is no longer static. Outside events and trends of thought press more closely upon the Indian villager today than ever before and they are unlikely to leave his beliefs and customs unchanged. Until the direction of the change becomes clear, no real assessment of British influence on Hinduism will be possible, but in the meantime it must be recognised that the intrusion of the outside world into the villages is the direct result of British rule.

The more material effects of that rule have been discussed in detail, and it is only necessary here to enumerate them for inclusion in the general picture. The establishment of law and order on so firm a basis that it survived the shock of the 1947 massacres; the development of communications and especially of the great Indian Railway system; the construction of vast irrigation works and the improvement of agriculture; the development of India’s productive resources and the establishment of great industries; the introduction of new and progressive systems of commercial and industrial organisation; and the remarkable improvement in public health—these are but the outward and visible signs of the process by which India is being transformed into a great modern state.

If, as has sometimes been suggested, this great material progress had been purchased with the loss of freedom, the price would have been too great. In reality, however, there was little in eighteenth-century India that could be called freedom. In many areas her inhabitants suffered all the miseries of anarchy and chaos, while elsewhere they endured tyranny under rulers often not of their race. Freedom was, indeed, at her lowest ebb in the India of that time, and even when the oppressions of the Company’s servants in the early days are taken into account, it is improbable that the people of the Lower Provinces felt that their liberty was being curtailed when the Company assumed the Diwani. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the sense of lack of freedom developed and it was then produced by two factors. The first of these was the new consciousness of nationality, engendered as we have seen by British rule, while the second was the unwise exclusion of Indians—in practice as distinct from theory—from all important offices of state. Indians now began to be conscious that they had lost their freedom and to experience, therefore, a deep sense of frustration, which in turn produced an unmistakable inferiority complex. The realisation that they were a subject people froze the spirit of educated Indians and destroyed any creative impulse that had survived the general demoralisation of the eighteenth century. Every increase in the efficiency—and even in the benevolence—of the British bureaucracy heightened this effect, and a well-intentioned ma bap²⁹ government sapped the self-respect and manliness of the Indian people. They became ever more conscious of a controlling grip. In such a grip the fine flower of the spirit could not blossom and material progress was thus accompanied by spiritual degeneration.

If this had continued India would have been doomed to perpetual servitude and Britain would have been condemned by her own principles. Fortunately for both countries that fate was averted by the growth of nationalism and the consequent regeneration of the Indian people. A new pride was born, a new hope was nourished, and soon Gandhi and Tagore held before their countrymen a torch, lit, indeed, by Western fires, but upheld by Indian hands.

This ultimate synthesis of East and West is perhaps Britain’s supreme success in India and it has had its apotheosis in the deep affection between the two peoples so clearly manifest after the transfer of power. To that great act of abdication there is no historical parallel. A new pattern has been devised and the world has been taught how an imperial relationship can evolve into a partnership of mutual respect and equality. This final act has released India from all the inhibitions of subjection, purged Britain from the racial pride of domination, and established between the two countries a bond of friendship which may well prove stronger and more enduring than the political tie which it has replaced.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Lists of Books

The following lists of books are not in any sense intended as a comprehensive bibliography. They include no books in foreign languages and only a few of the most important of the very large number of official documents which need to be consulted. They are in fact only meant as suggestions for general reading which the reader may find useful.

Chapters I and XI

1. Cambridge History of India, Vol. I, 1922.

2. History of Civilisation in Ancient India — R. C. Dutt, 1893.

3. Ancient India — E. J. Rapson, 1914.

4. The History of Aryan Rule in India — E. B. Havell.

5. The Early History of India — Vincent Smith, 1904.

6. Oxford History of India, Books I-III — Vincent Smith, 1920.

7. Ancient India — H. Oldenberg, 1898.

8. Buddhist India — T. W. Rhys Davids, 1903.

9. Asoka — Vincent Smith, 1909.

10. India as Described in Classical Literature — J. W. McCrindle, 1901.

11. Ancient India — T. L. Shah, 1938.

12. Hindu Civilisation — Radha Kumud Mookerji, 1950.

13. The Early History of Bengal — F. J. Monahan, 1925.

14. Ancient India — S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, 1911.

15. Arthasastra — Kautilya; trans. R. Shamashastry, 1929.

16. Public Administration in Ancient India — P. Banerjea, 1916.

17. Sukra-Nitisara — trans. Benoy Kumar Sarkar.

18. Classical Sanscrit Literature — A. Berriedale Keith, 1923.

19. History of Sanskrit Literature — A. A. Macdonnell, 1900.

20. Hymns of the Rigveda — trans. R. H. T. Griffith, 1897.

21. The Great Epic of India — E. W. Hopkins, 1901.

22. Manava — Dharma Sastra (Sacred Books of the East, XXV).

23. Peoples and Problems of India — T. W. Holderness, 1912.

24. Caste in India — E. Senart.

25. History of Caste in India — S. V. Ketkar, 1909.

26. The Religions of India — A. Barth (trans. from the French), 1882.

27. Religious Life and Thought in India — Monier Williams, 1887.

28. An Outline of the Religious Literature of India — J. N. Farquhar, 1920.

29. Hinduism — L. D. Barnett, 1906.

Chapters II, XIII and XIV

(a) Pre-Mughal Period

1. Mediaeval India — Iswari Prasad, 3rd edition, 1933.

2. Alberuni’s India — trans. Dr. E. C. Sachau, 1910.

3. History of the Rise of the Muhammadan Power in India — Col. J. Briggs (a translation of Ferishta).

4. Mediaeval India — Stanley Lane-Poole, 1903.

5. Travels of Ibn Batuta — trans. Rev. Samuel Lee.

6. India in the Fifteenth Century — R. H. Major, Hakluyt Society, 1859.

7. Cambridge History of India, Vol. III, 1928.

8. Oxford History of India, Book IV — Vincent Smith, 1920.

9. Chronicles of the Pathan Kings of Delhi — E. Thomas, 1871.

10. History of India — Mountstuart Elphinstone, 1841.

11. The History of India as Told by its Own Historians- — H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson, 1867.

12. Tabaqat-i-Nasiri — Minhaj-ud-din; trans. Raverty; Bibliotheca Indica, 1881.

13. Tabaqat-i-Akbari — Nizam-ud-din; trans. in Elliot and Dowson, V.

(b) Mughal Period

14. Babar — Stanley Lane-Poole, 1899.

15. Memoirs of Babur — ed. L. King, 1926.

16. Akbar the Great Mogul — Vincent Smith, 1917.

17. Ain-i-Akbari — Shaikh Abul Fazl Allami; trans. H. Blochmann and H. S. Jarrett, 1873.

18. Akbarnamah — Shaikh Abul Fazl Allami; trans. Beveridge.

19. India at the Death of Akbar — W. H. Moreland, 1920.

20. The Agrarian System of Moslem India — W. H. Moreland, 1929.

21. From Akbar to Aurangzeb — W. H. Moreland, 1923.

22. History of Aurangzeb — Jadunath Sarkar, 2nd edition, 1925.

23. Fall of the Mughal Empire — Jadunath Sarkar, 1932.

24. The Moghul Empire — H. G. Keene, 1866.

25. The Jesuits and the Great Mogul — E. McLagan, 1932.

26. History of Jahangir — Beni Prasad, 1922.

27. Memoirs of Jahangir — ed. Beveridge (trans. Rogers), 1909.

28. The Later Mughals — W. Irvine, 1922.

29. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India — ed. Foster, 1926.

30. Travels in the Mogul Empire — Bernier; trans. Constable and Smith, 1914.

31. Travels in India — Tavernier; trans. Ball, 1925.

32. Mongolicae Legationis Commentarius — trans. Hoyland, 1922.

33. Early Travels in India — ed. Foster, 1921.

34. Voyage to East India — Rev. C. Terry, 1777.

35. The Itinerario of Manrique — Hakluyt Society, 1927.

36. Storia do Mogor — Manucci; trans. W. Irvine, 1907–8.

37. Jahangir and the Jesuits — C. FL Payne, 1930.

38. Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV, 1937.

39. Tarikh-i-Badauni — trans. Ranking and Lowe, Asiatic Society, 1898.

Chapter III

1. The Rise of Portuguese Power in India — R. S. Whiteway, 1899.

2. Barbosa Duarte — trans. Dames, Hakluyt Society, 1918–21.

3. Voyages of Linschoten — Hakluyt Society, 1885.

4. India in the Fifteenth Century — R. H. Major, 1859.

5. The Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator — R. H. Major, 1877.

6. Purchas — His Pilgrims, 1624.

7. Albuquerque — H. Morse Stephens, 1892.

8. Travels of Ludovico di Varthema — trans. Winter Jones, 1864.

9. History of British India — W. W. Hunter, 1899.

10. History of the Portuguese in India — F. G. Danvers, 1894.

11. The History of the European Commerce with India — D. Macpherson, 1812.

12. The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster — Charles Markham, 1877.

13. The Early Chartered Companies — G. Cawston and A. H. Keane, 1896.

14. Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1555–1602 — ed. Miss E. B. Sainsbury.

Chapter IV

1. First Letter Book of the East India Company — ed. G. Birdwood, 1893.

2. Calendar of State Papers, East India, 1513–1634 — ed. W. N. Sainsbury.

3. Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1635–1675 — ed. Miss E. B. Sainsbury.

4. The First Englishmen in India — J. G. Locke, 1930.

5. History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan — R. Orme, 1803.

6. History of Bengal From Native Sources — Charles Stewart, 1910.

7. Diary of William Hedges — Hakluyt Society, 1887–9.

8. Statistical Account of Bengal — W. W. Hunter.

9. Early Annals of the English in Bengal — G. R. Wilson, 1895.

10. History of the Mahrattas — Grant Duff, 1826.

11. The English Factories in India — ed. W. Foster, 1909–11.

12. Commercial Relations Between India and England, 1601–1757 — Bal Krishna, 1924.

13. Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India — A. Lyall, 1920.

14. History of British India — James Mill, 1826.

15. The English in Western India — Rev. P. Anderson, 1856.

Chapter V

1. Dupleix and Clive — H. Dodwell, 1920.

2. Lord Clive — G. W. Forrest, 1918.

3. History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan — R. Orme, 1803.

4. History of the French in India — G. B. Malleson, 1893.

5. Stringer Lawrence — J. Biddulph, 1901.

6. Vestiges of Old Madras — H. D. Love, 1913.

7. Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan — L. B. Bowring, 1899.

8. Dupleix — G. B. Malleson, 1890. (The standard work on Dupleix is in French, by Gultru.)

9. The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India — A. Lyall, 1920.

Chapters VI and VII

1. The Rise of Bombay — S. M. Edwardes, 1902.

2. The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India — A. Lyall, 1920.

3. History of British India — James Mill, 1826.

4. British Beginnings in Western India — H. G. Rawlinson, 1920.

5. Keigwin’s Rebellion — R. and O. Strachey, 1916.

6. The East India Trade in the Seventeenth Century — Shafaat Ahmed, 1923.

7. Narratives of the Transactions in Bengal — H. Vansittart, 1766.

8. History of the British Empire in India — E. Thornton, 1840.

9. Lord Clive — John Malcolm, 1836.

10. Selections from the State Papers of the Governors General in India (Warren Hastings) — ed. G. W. Forrest, 1910.

11. Memoirs of William Hickey.

12. The Trial of Nanda Kumar — H. Beveridge, 1886.

13. Memoirs of Warren Hastings — Rev. G. R. Gleig, 1841.

14. Warren Hastings in Bengal — M. E. Monckton Jones, 1918.

15. Nuncomar and Impey — James Stephen, 1885.

16. Hastings and the Rohilla War — J. Strachey, 1892.

17. History of the Mahrattas — Grant Duff, 1826.

18. Early Records of British India — J. Talboys Wheeler, 1879.

19. Lord Clive — G. W. Forrest, 1913.

20. The Government of India — Courtney Ilbert, 1907.

Chapter VIII

1. Cornwallis — Seton Karr (Rulers of India), 1890.

2. History of the Mahrattas — Grant Duff, 1826.

3. The Political History of India from 1784–1823 — J. Malcolm, 1826.

4. Lord Wellesley — W. H. Hutton, 1893.

5. The Marquess of Hastings — J. Ross, 1913.

6. Cambridge History of India, Vol. V, 1929.

7. Lives of Indian Officers — J. W. Kaye, 1867.

8. History of the Maratha People — Kincaid and Parasnis, 1922.

9. Selections from the State Papers of the Governors General (Cornwallis) — ed. G. W. Forrest, 1926.

10. Life of Sir Thomas Munro — Rev. G. R. Gleig, 1830.

11. The Administration of the East India Company — J. W. Kaye, 1853.

Chapter IX

1. Account of the Kingdom of Caboul — Mountstuart Elphinstone, 1839.

2. Ranjit Singh — Lepel Griffin, 1892.

3. Sir Charles Napier — T. Rice Holmes, 1925.

4. History of the Sikhs — J. D. Cunningham, 1849.

5. Life of the Marquess of Dalhousie — W. Lee Warner, 1904.

6. Lord William Bentinck — D. C. Boulger, 1897.

7. History of the War in Afghanistan — J. W. Kaye, 1878.

8. John Russell Colvin — A. Colvin, 1895.

9. Viscount Hardinge — Chas. Hardinge, 1891.

10. The Marquess of Dalhousie — W. W. Hunter, 1890.

Chapter X

1. History of the Sepoy War in India — J. W. Kaye and G. B. Malleson, 1864.

2. Cawnpore — G. O. Trevelyan, 1865.

3. Life of John Nicholson — L. J. Trotter, 1897.

4. Hodson of Hodson’s Horse — L. J. Trotter, 1901.

5. History of the Indian Mutiny — T. R. Holmes, 1898.

6. Earl Canning — H. S. Cunningham, 1891.

7. Lord Lawrence — G. V. Aitcheson, 1892.

8. Clyde and Strathnairn — O. T. Burne, 1891.

9. Causes of the Indian Revolt — Sayyid Ahmad Khan.

Chapter XII

1. Age of the Imperial Guptas — R. D. Banerji.

2. Advanced History of India — R. C. Majumdar, Ray Chaudhuri and Datta, 1946.

3. Mediaeval India — Iswari Prasad, 2nd ed., 1933.

4. Mediaeval India under Muhamadan Rule — Stanley Lane-Poole, 1903.

5. The Agrarian System of Moslem India — W. H. Moreland, 1929.

6. Cambridge History of India) Vol. III, 1928.

7. The Pathan Kings of Delhi — E. Thomas, 1871.

8. Travels of Fah-Hien — trans, by S. Beal in Vol. I of Buddhist Records of the Western World.

Chapters XV, XVI and XVII

1. Indian Administration to the Dawn of Responsible Government — B. K. Thakore, 1922.

2. Constitutional History of India — A. B. Keith, 1936.

3. Early Revenue History of Bengal — F. D. Ascoli, 1917.

4. Observations on the Law and Constitution of the Present Government of India — A. Galloway, 1832.

5. Government of India — John Malcolm, 1833.

6. British Administration in India — G. Anderson, 1920.

7. The Making of British India — Ramsay Muir, 1917.

8. Administration of the East India Company — J. W. Kaye, 1853.

9. The I.C.S. — Edward Blunt, 1937.

10. Cambridge History of India, Vol. V, 1929.

11. Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy — A. B. Keith, 1922.

12. First Century of British Justice in India — Fawcett.

13. The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India — A. Lyall, 1920.

Chapter XVIII

1. Land Systems of British India — B. H. Baden Powell, 1892.

2. Early Revenue History of Bengal — F. D. Ascoli, 1917.

3. Oxford History of India — Vincent Smith, 1920.

4. Cornwallis — Seton Karr (Rulers of India), 1890.

5. Analysis of the Bengal Regulations — J. H. Harington, 1814–15.

6. Fifth Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812.

7. Administration of the East India Company — J. W. Kaye, 1853.

8. Life of Sir Thomas Munro — Rev. G. R. Gleig, 1830.

Chapter XIX

1. Travels of Peter Mundy — Hakluyt Society, 1907.

2. Akbar the Great Mogul — Vincent Smith, 1917.

3. Annals of Rural Bengal — W. W. Hunter, 1897.

4. Report of the Famine Commission, 1880.

5. The History and Economics of Indian Famines — A. Loveday, 1914.

6. Famines and Land Assessments in India — R. C. Dutt.

Chapter XX

1. The Indian Civil Service — L. S. S. O’Malley, 1931.

2. The I.C.S. — Edward Blunt, 1937.

3. Report of the Indian Public Service Commission under Sir Charles Aitchison appointed in 1886.

4. Report of the Indian Police Commission appointed in 1902.

5. Report of the Committee appointed by the Government of India to examine the question of the reorganisation of the Indian Medical Services, 1919.

6. Cambridge History of India, Vol. VI, 1932.

7. Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India — Thompson and Garratt, 1934.

Chapter XXI

1. Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs — E. Thornton, 1837.

2. Report on the Depredations committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India — W. H. Sleeman, 1840.

3. Lord William Bentinck — D. C. Boulger, 1897.

4. Oxford History of India, Book VIII — Vincent Smith, 1920.

5. Cambridge History of India, Vol. VI, 1932.

6. Infanticide in Western India — John Wilson, 1855.

Chapter XXII

1. Suttee — Edward Thompson, 1928.

2. Rambles and Recollections — W. H. Sleeman, 1844.

3. India’s Cries to British Humanity — J. Peggs, 1830.

4. William Carey — F. D. Walker, 1926.

5. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan — J. Tod, 1829.

6. A Forgotten Empire — R. Sewell, 1900.

7. Travels in the Mogul Empire — Bernier; trans. Constable and Smith, 1914.

8. Cambridge History of India, Vol. VI, 1932.

Chapters XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX and XXXI

1. Political India, 1832–1332 — ed. John Cumming (Oxford University Press).

2. Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India — Thompson and Garratt, 1934.

3. Indian Speeches and Documents on British Rule, 1821–1318 — ed. J. K. Majumdar, 1937.

4. Cambridge History of India, Vol. VI, 1932.

5. The Making of British India — Ramsay Muir, 1917.

6. Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings, 1907.

7. Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India — Bishop Heber, 1828.

8. Indian Nationality — R. N. Gilchrist, 1920.

9. The English in India — John Marriott, 1932.

10. Modern India and the West — L. S. S. O’Malley, 1941.

11. Selections from the Educational Records of the Government of India — H. Sharp and J. A. Richey, 1920 and 1922.

12. Modern Religious Movements in India — J. N. Farquhar, 1919.

13. A Political History of India — John Malcolm, 1826.

14. Life of Sir Thomas Munro — Rev. G. R. Gleig, 1830.

15. Elphinstone — J. S. Cotton, 1892.

16. Nationalism — Rabindranath Tagore, 1918.

17. The British in India — P. J. Griffiths, 1946.

18. Lives of Indian Officers — J. W. Kaye, 1867.

19. New India — Henry Cotton, 1907.

20. Indian Unrest — Valentine Chirol, 1910.

21. Indian Politics Since the Mutiny — C. Y. Chintamani, 1940.

22. The Growth of Indian Nationalism — Verney Lovett, 1920.

23. A Nation in Making — Surendranath Banerjea, 1925.

24. Minutes of Proceedings of the Bombay Association, 1852.

25. Journal of the East India Association, Vol. I, 1867.

26. Dadabhai Naoroji — R. P. Masani, 1939.

27. The Rise and Growth of the Congress — C. F. Andrews and G. Mukherji, 1938.

28. Life of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava — A. Lyall, 1905.

29. India Under Ripon — Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1909.

30. Sixty Years of Congress — Satyapal and Prabodh Chandra, 1946.

31. History of the Indian National Congress — Pattabhi Sitaramayya, 1935.

32. A. O. Hume — W. Wedderburn, 1913.

33. How India Wrought for Freedom — Annie Besant, 1915.

34. Indian National Evolution — Amvika Charan Mazumdar, 1917.

35. Discovery of India — -Jawaharlal Nehru, 1946.

36. Parliamentary Government in India — B. P. Singh Roy.

Chapter XXVII

1. Modern India and the West — L. S. S. O’Malley, 1941.

2. The Indian Press — Margarita Barns, 1940.

3. The Press in British India — Leicester Stanhope, 1823.

4. History of the Indian Press — Arnot, 1829.

5. ‘Journalism in India’ — a lecture by Sir Alfred Watson published in the Journal of the East India Association, April 1933.

6. ‘The Growth of the Press in India’ — a lecture by Sir Alfred Watson published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 16th January 1948.

7. Lives of Indian Officers — J. W. Kaye, 1867.

Chapter XXXII

Many of the books in Chapters XXIV to XXXIII will be of use for this chapter. There is, unfortunately, no comprehensive work on the growth of the Moslem League, but the following books may be consulted.

1. Pakistan — published by the Director of Foreign Publicity, Government of Pakistan, 1949.

2. Muslim League Yesterday and Today — A. B. Rajput, 1948.

3. Indian Musalmans — W. W. Hunter, 1871.

4. Muhammadanism in India — H. G. Bowen, 1873.

5. Nationalism in Conflict in India — V. D. Savarkar, 1942.

6. A Report on the Constitutional Problem in India — R. Coupland, 1942–4.

7. A Cultural History of India during the British Period — Yusuf Ali, 1940.

8. Selected Writings and Speeches of Moulana Mohamed Ali, Afzal Iqbal.

Chapters XXXIII and XXXIV

1. History of the Indian National Congress — Pattabhi Sitaramayya, 1936.

2. Pakistan — Director of Foreign Publicity, Government of Pakistan, 1949.

3. The Indian Problem — R. Coupland, 1942. (This is the first part of the Coupland Report.)

4. The Making of Federal India — N. N. Gangulee, 1936.

5. Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, 1930.

6. Political India — ed. John Gumming, 1932.

7. The Muslim League Yesterday and Today — A. B. Rajput, 1948.

8. British Government in India — Lord Curzon.

9. India, Its Administration and Progress — John Strachey, 4th ed., 1911.

10. Sketch of the History of India, 1858–1918 — H. H. Dodwell, 1936.

11. Government of India — C. P. Ilbert, 3rd ed., 1915.

12. Development of Self-Government in India — G. M. P. Cross, 1922.

13. Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918.

14. Constitutional History of India — A. B. Keith, 1936.

15. Cambridge History of India, Vol. VI, 1932.

Chapters XL and XLII

1. Narratives of the Transactions in Bengal — Henry Vansittart, 1766.

2. A View of the Rise of the English Government in Bengal — H. Verelst, 1772.

3. History of British India, Vol. III. — James Mill, 1826.

4. Annals of Rural Bengal — W. W. Hunter, 1897.

5. Considerations on Indian Affairs — W. Bolts, 1772–5.

6. Economic History of India Under Early British Rule — R. C. Dutt, 1901.

7. Economic History of India in the Victorian Age — R. C. Dutt, 1903.

8. Third Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1773.

9. Ninth Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on the Administration of Justice in India, 1783.

10. Our Financial Relations With India — G. Wingate.

11. Economic Annals of Bengal — J. G. Sinha, 1927.

12. Fifth Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812.

13. Travels in India — Tavernier; trans. Ball, 1925.

14. Anglo-Eastern Empire in 1832 — R. M. Martin, 1832.

15. Indian Journal — Bishop Heber.

16. Economics of British India — Jadunath Sarkar, 1909.

Chapter XLI

1. Administration of the East India Company — J. W. Kaye, 1853.

2. Land Systems of British India — B. H. Baden-Powell, 1892.

3. Introduction to the Regulations of the Bengal Code — G. D. Field, 1912.

4. Modern India — George Campbell.

5. Fifth Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812.

6. Early Revenue History of Bengal — F. D. Ascoli, 1917.

7. Analysis of the Bengal Regulations — J. H. Harington, 1814–15.

8. Observations on the Law and Constitution of India — A. Galloway, 1825.

9. Economic History of India under Early British Rule — R. C. Dutt, 1901.

10. Economic History of India in the Victorian Age — R. C. Dutt, 1903.

11. Journey through Mysore and Southern India — F. Buchanan, 1807.

12. Life of Sir Thomas Munro — Rev. G. R. Gleig, 1830.

13. Bombay Administration Report, 1872–3.

14. Cambridge History of India, Vol. VI, 1932.

15. Cornwallis — Seton Karr, 1890.

Chapter XLIII

1. Review of Irrigation in India, 1918–21 — Government of India.

2. Report of the Irrigation Committee (Government of India), 1903.

3. Irrigation in India — D. G. Harris, 1923.

4. Irrigation in India — Leaflet No. 1 issued by the Central Board of Irrigation, 1947.

5. Economic Effects of Irrigation — D. R. Gadgil; publication No. 17 of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.

6. Modern India — ed. John Cumming (Oxford University Press).

7. Cambridge History of India, Vols. I and III. (For occasional references to irrigation in early times.)

8. The Agrarian System of Moslem India — W. H. Moreland, 1929.

9. The Early History of India — Vincent Smith, 1904.

10. History of Aryan Rule in India — E. B. Havell.

Chapter XLIV

1. Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, 1928.

2. Agriculture in India — James Mackenna, 1915.

3. Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture — Dr. Voelcker, 1893.

Chapter XLV

1. Quarterly Review, 1868 — article on Indian Railways.

2. Modern India — ed. John Cumming (Oxford University Press), 1931.

3. ‘Sixty Years of Rail Transport’ — an article by Professor L. A. T. Natesan in the Diamond Jubilee number of Capital, December 1948.

4. India — Its Administration and Progress — John Strachey, 4th ed., 1911.

5. The Economic Development of India — Vera Anstey, 3rd ed., 1936.

6. Modern India and the West — L. S. S. O’Malley, 1941.

7. The Marquess of Dalhousie — W. W. Hunter, 1896.

8. Report on the Material and Moral Progress of India, 1901–2.

9. Report of the East India Railway Committee, 1920–1.

Chapter XLVI

1. Indigo — W. M. Reid, 1887.

2. Economic Development of the Overseas Empire — L. C. A. Knowles, 1924.

3. Report of the Indigo Commission, 1860.

4. The Trade of the Indian Ocean — Vera Anstey, 1929.

5. The Economic Development of India — Vera Anstey, 3rd ed., 1936.

6. All About Tea — W. H. Ukers, 1935.

7. Early History of the Tea Industry of Northern India — H. H. Mann.

8. Commercial Products of India — George Watt, 1908.

9. Travels in the Mogul Empire — Bernier; trans. Constable and Smith, 1914.

10. Travels in India — Tavernier; trans. Ball, 1925.

11. India at the Death of Akbar — W. H. Moreland, 1920.

12. Development of Capitalist Enterprise in India — D. H. Buchanan, 1934.

13. Annals of Rural Bengal — W. W. Hunter, 1897.

Chapters XLVII and XLIX

1. The Romance of Jute — D. R. Wallace, 1928.

2. Jute Survey and Directory — published by Capital, 1951.

3. Economic Development of India — Vera Anstey, 3rd ed., 1936.

4. Commercial Products of India — George Watt, 1908.

5. Iron and Steel in India — Lovat Fraser, 1919.

6. A Journey From Madras — Francis Buchanan.

7. Development of Capitalist Enterprise in India — D. H. Buchanan, 1934.

8. Essays on Indian Economics — M. G. Ranade, 1899.

9. Bombay Industries: The Cotton Mills — S. M. Rutnagur, 1927.

10. The Cotton Industry of India — Arno Pearce, published by the International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners.

11. A Hundred Tears of Cotton — Dantwala.

12. Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, Vol. I, 1909.

13. Indian Trade and Industry — published by the High Commissioner for India, 7th Oct. 1949.

Chapter XLVIII

1. Report of the Indian Central Banking Enquiry Committee, 1931.

2. Indian Finance and Banking — Findlay Shirras, 1919.

3. Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island Vol. I, 1909.

4. Industrial Organisation in India — Lokanathan, 1935.

5. The Economic Development of India — Vera Anstey, 3rd ed., 1936.

6. Report of the Indian Tariff Board: Cotton Industry, 1927.

Chapters XLIX and L

1. Report of the Indian Industrial Commission, 1916–18.

2. Report of the Indian Fiscal Commission, 1921–2.

3. The Foundations of Indian Economics — Radha Kamal Mukerjee, 1916.

4. Economic Conditions in India — P. P. Pillai, 1925.

5. Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918.

6. India at the Death of Akbar — W. H. Moreland, 1920.

7. Economic History of India in the Victorian Age — R. C. Dutt, 1903.

8. The Economic Development of India — Vera Anstey, 3rd ed., 1936.

9. The National Income of British India — V. K. R. V. Rao, 1940.

10. Modern India — ed. John Cumming (Oxford University Press), 1931.