An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Curzon, who conducted the grandest of the three durbars just two years after a ruinous famine, was the epitome of imperial majesty as viceroy.

Thus the British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successors of the Mughal emperor.

The India Office in London even had a room with two identical doors for entry, in case two Indian potentates of equivalent rank had to be received at the same time, so that neither had to precede the other.

confessed that ‘the Indians have been excluded from every honour, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept’.

Mediocrities ruled the roost, and they were paid far more than Indians, since they had to endure the ‘hardships’ of the Indian heat—despite the warmth of the sun offering a welcome respite, for most, from the cold and fog of grey, benighted Blighty.

Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was ‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service’.

There were only 31,000 Britons in India in 1805 (of whom 22,000 were in the army and 2,000 in civil government).

In 1911, there were 164,000 Britons living in India (of whom 66,000 were in the army and police and just 4,000 in civil government).

The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.’

In David Gilmour’s telling, they had no illusions about preparing Indians for self-government; their view of Indians was at best paternalist, at worst contemptuous (well into the twentieth century, they spoke and wrote of the need to treat Indians as ‘children’, incapable of ruling themselves).

That bureaucracy was all-pervasive, overpaid, obtusely process-ridden, remarkably inefficient and largely indifferent to the well-being of the people for whose governance it had, after all, been created.

It also meant that decisions were increasingly made in offices, behind closed doors, by foreigners with no connection to those whose fates they were deciding.

The old accessible Indian rulers were replaced by new officious British bureaucrats who were good at manipulating the paperwork created by the new rules but had little interest in the well-being of their subjects nor the capacity to establish their authority other than by reference to their rules.

Decisions were based on rules rather than facts, ‘often merely disconnecting officers from the political circumstances that called upon them to make decisions in the first place’.

In the summer capital of Simla, with its population of ‘grass widows’ enjoying the cooler air while their husbands toiled in the hot plains, the ‘main occupations’ were ‘gambling, drinking, and breaking the 7th Commandment’.

The British in India created little islands of Englishness, planting ferns and roses and giving their cottages nostalgia-suffused names like Grasmere Lodge (in Ooty) and Willowdale (in Darjeeling).

At English clubs and tennis matches, elegant balls and tiger shoots, the women of the ‘fishing-fleet’ allowed themselves to be reeled in by eligible civilians.

‘In the end Chetty shot himself. It was a sad end for a man gifted and likeable. And although such an end was unusual, the causes which led to it are universal. I have known several civilians who were Indians, and… I think they were all unhappy.’

J. T. Sunderland observed that the difference in salaries and emoluments was so great that 8,000 British officers earned £13,930,554, while 130,000 Indians in government service were collectively paid a total of £3,284,163.

‘With the material wealth go also the wisdom and experience of the country. Europeans occupy almost all the higher places in every department of Government directly or indirectly under its control. While in India they acquire India’s money, experience, and wisdom; and when they go, they carry both away with them, leaving India so much poorer in material and moral wealth.

Racism, of course, was central to the imperial project: it was widespread, flagrant and profoundly insulting, and it worsened as British power grew.

Bitterness at racial discrimination even in defeat played no small part in Gandhi’s decision to launch the ‘Quit India’ movement that month, calling for Britain’s departure from India.

Kipling wrote articles designed to show the inability of Indians to govern themselves, prefiguring Kipling the later imperial prophet declaiming thunderous anapests about the white man’s burden. In both incarnations, Kipling the arch-imperialist, in the admission of a sympathetic biographer, wrote of Indians ‘sometimes with a rare understanding, sometimes with crusty, stereotyped contempt’.

The Empire’s heroes were, in other words, men who used barbarity to pacify the supposedly barbarous.

Britain’s motives may have been entirely selfish, as I demonstrate in Chapter 1, but on the positive side, its imperialism brought in law and order amid what looked perilously like anarchy, settled the perennial conflicts amongst warring groups and principalities, and permitted a less violent form of political competition than might otherwise have occurred in India.

The Government of India Act, 1858, transformed the post of Governor General (soon re-designated as the viceroy), who would be directly responsible for the administration of India, along with provincial governors.

However, the Acts of 1892 and 1909 were at best cosmetic alterations to the established system and marginally affected how these Indian councils were constituted and functioned.

The Secretary of State for India who gave his name to the 1909 reforms, John Morley, had even opposed increasing membership of Indians to the Indian councils and argued that in his view the British government of India was run with all the consent and representation of the Indian people it needed.

Indeed, such a thought could not have been farther from the minds of the reformers; every ‘reform’ that the British government brought into India’s governance, up to the Government of India Act of 1935, protected the absolute authority of the Governor General and the Parliament of Britain.

The objective was a gradual increase in representative government, not the establishment of full-fledged democracy.

The problem is that this liberalism was practised within severe limits. The Indian National Congress was established in 1885 as a voice of moderate, constitutionalist Indian opinion by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, and a group of well-educated, establishmentarian Indians. Far from welcoming such a development, as a truly liberal regime seeking to instil democracy in its charges ought to have done, the British reacted to it with varying degrees of hostility and contempt.

Since such approaches never worked, the national movement soon began to take a different approach, that of mass political agitation against Curzon’s 1905 Partition of Bengal, in order to make an effective impact upon the British.

As British merchants in Bengal complained of a dramatic downturn in their sales and the conversion of regular profits into unaccustomed losses, the agitation triumphed: the British reversed the Partition.

The Mahatma’s singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawing room.

To put his principles into practice, the Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and travelled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poor sanitation and child marriage, and preaching an eclectic set of virtues from sexual abstinence to the weaving of khadi and the beneficial effects of frequent enemas.

1917, Lord Montagu had placed before the British Cabinet a proposed declaration pledging ‘the gradual development of free institutions in India with a view to ultimate self-government’.

Self-government under the ‘Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms’ ushered in to fulfil this declaration turned out to involve a system where Indians would serve as window dressing for British imperial power.

The governor, and at the centre the viceroy, retained the right to reject any vote of the elected legislators and enact any laws the elected representatives refused to pass.

Far from leading to ‘the progressive realization of responsible government in India’, this was regressive indeed, and it was unanimously rejected by Indian public opinion and by a deeply betrayed Mahatma.

By 1930, the Indian National Congress had decided to go beyond its modest goals of 1918. It issued a Declaration of Independence on 26 January 1930:

As many as 74,187 Indian soldiers died during World War I and a comparable number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, were largely omitted from British popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes.

In historical texts, it often appears formally that the Government of India ‘offered’ the assistance to the British and that His Majesty’s Government ‘graciously accepted’ the offer to pay unfairly large amounts of money, including a lump sum payment of £100 million as a special contribution to HMG’s expenses towards a European war. This elides the fact, of course, that the ‘Government of India’ consisted of Englishmen accountable to His Majesty’s Government in Britain.

It was estimated at the time that the value of India’s contribution in cash and kind amounted to £146.2 million, worth some £50 billion in today’s money.

Indian jawans stopped the German advance at Ypres in the autumn of 1914, soon after the war broke out, while the British were still recruiting and training their own forces.

Part of the reason is that they were not fighting for their own country. None of the soldiers was a conscript: soldiering was their profession. They served the very British empire that was oppressing their own people back home.

In return for India’s extraordinary support, the British had insincerely promised to deliver progressive self-rule to India at the end of the war. Perhaps, had they kept that pledge, the sacrifices of India’s World War I soldiers might have been seen in their homeland as a contribution to India’s freedom.

He hoped, he wrote, ‘that India, by this very act, would become the most favourite partner [of the British], and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past’.

When the war ended in triumph for Britain, India was denied its promised reward. Instead of self-government, the British offered the fraudulent Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms in 1918 which left all power in British hands and attempted to fob off the Indians with minimal authority over inconsequential issues.

It passed the repressive Rowlatt Act in 1919, reimposing upon India all the wartime restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly that had been lifted with the Armistice.

Public protests against this draconian legislation were quelled ruthlessly. The worst incident was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of hundreds of unarmed innocents in April 1919, which is discussed more fully in chapters 3 and 4.