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Indian nationalists felt that self-governance could never be obtained by legal means from perfidious Albion, but would have to be wrested from the unwilling grasp of the British through a struggle for freedom.
The last of these, he tells us, is ‘the most distinctive feature of the Empire’ since ‘whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society’.
It took more than a century for the first newspaper to be printed in India when, in 1780, James Augustus Hicky published his Bengal Gazette, or Calcutta General Advertiser. But the East India Company soon looked askance at his inconvenient views and, after two years of mounting exasperation, seized his press in 1782.
The Times of India, established in Bombay in 1838, and the Calcutta Statesman (which began life in 1875, but incorporated the Friend of India which was founded in 1818) soon established themselves as reliable pillars of the establishment, solidly committed to British imperial interests but able to criticize the policies and actions of the government in a responsible manner.
Arguably the most notable of these was The Hindu in Madras, established as a weekly in 1878 and converted into a daily from 1889, which the British came to regard for a long time as the voice of responsible Indian opinion.
By 1875, it was estimated that there were 475 newspapers in India, the vast majority owned and edited by Indians.
There is no doubt that the press contributed significantly to the development and growth of nationalist feelings in India, inculcated the idea of a broader public consciousness, exposed many of the failings of the colonial administration and played an influential part in fomenting opposition to many aspects of British rule.
(It was the introduction of this Act that prompted the Amrita Bazar Patrika to convert itself into an English-language newspaper overnight, to avoid coming under the new law’s purview.)
The letter contained explosive news, revealing as it did in considerable detail the viceroy’s plans to annex the Hindu Maharaja-ruled Muslim-majority state of Jammu & Kashmir. To the consternation of the British authorities, Amrita Bazar Patrika published the letter on its front page. The cat was out of the bag: the newspaper reached the Maharaja of Kashmir, who promptly protested, set sail for London and vehemently lobbied the authorities there to honour their predecessors’ guarantees of his
Had this exposé not taken place, Kashmir would not have remained a ‘princely state’, free to choose the country, and the terms, of its accession upon Independence in 1947; it would have been a province of British India, subject to being carved up by a careless British pen during Partition.
The Congress leader Annie Besant, for instance, had refused to pay a security on a paper she published advocating Home Rule, and was arrested for failing to do so and thereby violating the Act.
The British colonial governments in the provinces enjoyed the right to search any newspaper’s premises and confiscate any material they found ‘seditious’. The Indian press, in other words, was fettered rather than free, but that it existed, and could serve as a rallying point for public opinion, is to the credit of both the British authorities and the Indians who worked in the media.
In no Indian newspaper, wrote the fair-minded British observer, Henry Nevinson, in 1908, ‘have I seen more deliberate attempts to stir up race hatred and incite to violence than in Anglo-Indian [i.e. British settlers’] papers, which suffer nothing’.
The press, in other words, was free, but some newspapers (the British-owned ones) were freer than others.
It is remarkable that when the Indian nationalists, victorious in their freedom struggle, sat down to write a Constitution for independent India, they created a political system based entirely on British parliamentary democracy.
Pluralist democracy is India’s greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is the source of our major weaknesses. India’s many challenges require political arrangements that permit decisive action, whereas ours increasingly promote drift and indecision.
The parliamentary system has not merely outlived any good it could do; it was from the start unsuited to Indian conditions and is primarily responsible for many of our principal political ills.
This is why I have repeatedly advocated a presidential system for India not just for the federal government in New Delhi, but a system of directly elected chief executives at the levels of villages, towns, states and the centre, elected for fixed terms and accountable to the voters every five years, rather than to the caprices of legislatures and the shifting majorities of municipal councils or village panchayats.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is ‘based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people; it crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully.
This injury to India’s soul—the very basis of a nation’s self-respect—is what is always overlooked by apologists for colonialism.
Bringing British law to the natives was arguably one of the most important constituent elements of this mission;
In addition, the British introduced their ideas of trial by jury, freedom of expression and due process of law. These are incontestable legal values, except in their actual manner of working, for in its application during the colonial era, the rule of law was not exactly impartial.
Sentences handed down by British judges were never equal for Indians and Europeans:
Indian defendants were more than twice as likely as European ones to face murder or attempted murder charges for violent crimes. Statistically, European assaults on Indians were far more frequent than those by Indians on Europeans, yet almost all of the latter were charged as murder whereas most European misdeeds were deemed to be either accidental or in self-defence, and were in any case downgraded from murder to assault.
If Curzon, of all people, was moved to make a statement sympathetic to Indians, one can imagine the scale of the problem.
exceptions to this norm of race-conscious justice. In three rare cases, Britons were executed for killing Indians: John Rudd in Bengal (1861), four sailors named Wilson, Apostle, Nicholas, and Peters in Bombay (1867), and George Nairns in Bengal (1880).
Generally speaking, British civilian judges and up-country magistrates were reluctant to punish Europeans, whereas military courts and urban High Courts were willing to impose relatively more serious punishments for attacks on Indians.
The imperial system of law was created by a foreign race and imposed upon a conquered people who had never been consulted in its creation. It was, pure and simple, an instrument of colonial control.
Racial discrimination was legal: as we have seen, in addition to private clubs that were open only to whites, many British hotels and other establishments sported signs saying ‘Indians and dogs not allowed’. (It was the experience of being expelled from one of them, Watson’s Hotel in Bombay, that led Jamsetji Tata to build one of the world’s finest and most opulent hotels of its time, the Taj Mahal, which was open to Indians.)
India’s rape law, enshrined in the colonial-era Indian Penal Code, placed the burden of the victim to establish her ‘good character’ and prove that a rape had occurred, which left her open to discredit by opposing counsel.
The penal code contained forty-nine articles on crimes relating to dissent against the state (and only eleven on crimes involving death).
But in the process Britain has saddled us with an adversarial legal system, excessively bogged down in procedural formalities, which is far removed from India’s traditional systems of justice.
The colonial legacy has meant a system of interminable trials and long-pending cases, leaving India with an unenviable world record for judicial backlog that exceeds by far every other country in the world. (There are still cases pending, in some of India’s lower courts, which were filed in the days of the British Raj.)
Since the British were not motivated by either the crusading Christianity of the Spanish or the cultural zeal of the French, but merely by pecuniary greed, they were not unduly anxious to transform Indian society or shape it in their image.
Whereas the Portuguese rapidly Christianized Goa, for instance, the British did not import their first Bishop till 1813.
For most of the imperialists, India was a career, not a crusade. Changing India was not the object; making money out of India was.
fact, as we shall see, the caste system became more rigid under the British than it had been in precolonial India.
The fact is that the British interfered with social customs only when it suited them to do so.
A number of raging controversies in India in 2016, though seemingly unrelated, have brought into sharp focus the one element they have in common—they all relate to criminal offences codified in colonial-era British legislation that India has proved unable or unwilling to outgrow.
Sedition was therefore explicitly intended as an instrument to terrorize Indian nationalists:
There had never been a taboo against homosexuality in Indian culture and social practice—until the British Victorians introduced one.
On the contrary, in the great epic the Mahabharata, the gender-changing Shikhandi killed Bhishma.
Transgender people were recognized as a napunsakh gender in Vedic and Puranic literature and were given due importance in India throughout history (and even in the Islamic courts during the period of Mughal rule).
Instead of India’s traditional tolerance and ‘live and let live’, the British saddled the country with a colonial-era interpretation of what was good and right for Indians.
A husband can prosecute his wife for adultery, and a man having sexual relations with his wife, but a woman cannot sue her husband for having an extramarital relationship, provided his partner is not underage or married.
It is time for twenty-first-century India to get the government out of the bedroom, where the British were unembarrassed to intrude. It is also past time to realize that the range of political opinion permissible in a lively and contentious democracy cannot be reconciled with the existence of a pernicious sedition law.
British claims to creating viable political institutions in India, a democratic spirit, an efficient bureaucracy and the rule of law all seem hollow after the analysis in the previous chapter, it is their overarching assertion of having bequeathed India its political unity that underpins these claims.
As early as 1859, the then British governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, advised London that ‘Divide et impera was the old Roman maxim, and it should be ours’.
Cultural forms in societies newly classified as “traditional” were reconstructed and transformed by this knowledge, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and East…
Whereas an Akbar might have used such technologies to fuse his diverse people together, the British used them to separate, classify and divide.
