The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (33 page)

This steady tightening of the economic and strategic bond between Britain and India was symptomatic of a deeper force for integration whose effects were not so easily managed. Like other parts of the extra-European world, India became more and more accessible to European influences as the frequency, speed, volume and cost of communications with the West were transformed by the telegraph, railways, steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal.
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Information from, or about, India became available in Britain in greater quantity, and from a much wider variety of unofficial sources, especially the English-language newspapers owned by private British interests in the sub-continent. Political, scientific and literary ideas from Europe circulated more rapidly and much more cheaply in India, reaching – and disturbing – wider audiences. Christian notions of religious community and personal ethics posed a sharper challenge. European styles – in speech, humour, dress, deportment, leisure and family life – became more widely known and imitated. But the results of all this were not simply to make India more culturally attuned to Britain. Far from it. Instead, three contradictory tendencies were at work. First, the larger flow of news and information back to Britain, much of it originating in the Anglo-Indian press, helped entrench in ‘Home’ opinion a negative view of Indian political aspirations and a condescending attitude towards the ‘exotic chaos’ of Indian society. This was the outlook of the British settler community writ large. Secondly, it heightened the sense of destiny among Western-educated (or ‘anglo-literate’) Indians about their role as the intermediaries between India and Europe, as the standard-bearers of modernity and as the natural legatees of British rule whenever it might end. For who could doubt that India must adapt, and be adapted to, a West-centred world? Thirdly (however), the flood of European attitudes, ideas, images, habits and prejudices pouring into India evoked an anxious, angry, defensive response from those who feared that the social and moral foundations of Indian society – Muslim or Hindu – would be washed away in the process.
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For a wide section of the traditional educated class (including some who had acquired an ‘English’ education) the close encounter with imperial Britain was the signal for a campaign of cultural rearmament. Religion must be renovated; social discipline reinforced; moral order reasserted; language reformed; literature reinvented; history rewritten; the nation (or nations) remade. It was in this uneasy atmosphere that the terms of India's connection with the emerging British world-system became the object of a subdued (by later standards) but fierce political struggle between 1880 and 1914.

The Civilian Raj

At bottom, this was a question of how far the ‘Civilian Raj’ would be diluted by the admission of Indians into its executive and legislative branches. The ‘Civilians’ were members of the Indian Civil Service, recruited by an examination held in Britain and almost exclusively British in origin. They formed an administrative cadre that numbered around 1,000 who had signed the ‘covenant’ of faithful service, and for whom the 700 or so most senior posts in the central and provincial governments were reserved, including the key position of district officer in the 250 districts of British India.
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The Civilians were a bureaucracy whose medium was the official minute, memorandum, report and inquiry. But they bore only a superficial resemblance to civil servants at home. In practice, they formed a ruling oligarchy whose authority was limited only (and in theory) by the oversight of the India Office in London; and by the presence in India of a Viceroy, two governors (in Bombay and Madras) and one or two members of the Viceroy's executive council, all habitually appointed from outside the ranks of the Service and (supposedly) immune to its prejudices. In pay, status, prospects and pension, the Civilians (whose name in print was invariably followed by the honorific letters ‘ICS’) stood at the summit of the European official hierarchy: above the army, medical service, police, forestry service and education: and far above the lowly Railway and Public Works departments.

In the thirty years that followed the end of Company rule in 1858, the Civilians had consolidated their power. Their internal solidarity had been reinforced, not least by the virtual exclusion of qualified Indians. Their authority was enhanced by the new emphasis on administrative and financial stability rather than the forcible annexation of princely states – a practice that had given Company rule its aggressive, militaristic character. Through the census, the
Imperial Gazetteer of India
completed in 1881, the great
Statistical Survey
with its 114 volumes and 54,000 pages, the ethnographic studies of ‘tribes and castes’, and the district ‘histories’ compiled by energetic officials, the Civilian Raj extended and codified its administrative knowledge and imposed its categories on an untidy social reality.
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More fundamental, perhaps, was the virtual demolition of supra-local political ties between Indians, partly achieved by Company expansion before 1857, and completed after the Mutiny with the final abolition of the Mughal throne (the surviving princely states were closely supervised and political contact between them forbidden). For thirty years thereafter, British India resembled the
Agraria
imagined by Ernest Gellner:
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a congeries of districts without horizontal connections (for the provinces were merely administrative confections without economic or cultural rationale). Their only links were vertical: through an alien bureaucratic hierarchy with whose high culture, language and ethnic origins they had nothing in common – but whose authority they could not hope to challenge. It was this localisation and differentiation of Indian politics that was faithfully recorded in the Civilians’ gazetteers, surveys and censuses: indeed, they were the warrant and charter of the Civilian Raj.

Entrenched in India, the Civilians were protected in the rear by political sympathy in Britain. Unofficial information from India upheld the necessity of authoritarian rule, at times with hysterical urgency. The mild extension of judicial powers proposed for Indian (i.e. non-British) officials under the Ilbert Bill in 1883 produced an explosion of settler rage that soon found an echo in the British press. British commercial interests in India, with their City connections, had little love for the Civilian Raj but even less for any alternative. The new regime established in London to supervise the Indian government after 1857 saddled the Secretary of State for India with a ‘Council of India’, largely composed of retired Civilians. It formed the centre of an extended network of ‘Old India Hands’ whose mandarin scholarship and constant intervention in the correspondence columns largely informed ‘public opinion’ on late-Victorian India.
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Then, at a crucial moment in the 1880s, the intellectual basis of Gladstonian Liberalism was challenged by a powerful phalanx of Liberal thinkers, including several, like Henry Maine and Fitzjames Stephen, with Indian experience. Their part in the Liberal split over Irish Home Rule in 1886 eventually helped to turn the authoritarian bureaucracy of British India from an embarrassing exception to Liberal practice into an authentic (though not uncontested) expression of the Liberal ideal.
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These benign conditions strengthened the Civilians’ claim to be the ideal ‘collaborators’ of British imperialism in India. Of course, no contemporary would have used such a term. What makes it appropriate in historical analysis is that the Civilians did not see themselves as, nor were they in reality, mere
agents
of the British state. They were ‘Anglo-Indians’
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– the political hinge between Britain and the indigenous communities of the sub-continent. ‘Anglo-India’ had its own interests, its own ethos, its own patriotism, its own shrines (at Lucknow and Cawnpore) and martyrs, its own ideology, its own state. Its self-image was energetically disseminated by the late-Victorian Civilians who piled up an astonishing literature of antiquarian history, sociological enquiry, ethnographic description, political commentary and biographical memoir, as well as the vast collective labour of the district gazetteers – a literary self-creation as remarkable as that of any conquest state in history. In a standard text on Indian administration, Sir George Chesney's
Indian Polity
,
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Anglo-India's claim to political autonomy was stridently asserted. ‘The Indian administration’, said Chesney, ‘must not be placed at the mercy of the erratic dictates of a chance majority in the House of Commons.’
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India ‘should not…be subjected to treatment which the…Commons would not venture to adopt towards the smallest self-governing colony’
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– a claim that anticipated the later demand of the Indian National Congress for self-government on the model of the ‘white dominions’. From retired Civilians poured a stream of reminiscence proclaiming India's incapacity for self-rule and the Civilians’ role as the platonic guardians of the peasant mass. In 1899 came the first volume of Sir William Wilson Hunter's
History of British India.
Hunter was, with Sir Alfred Lyall, one of the great scholar-mandarins of the late-Victorian Raj. He had master-minded the
Imperial Gazetteer
. He became Curator of the Indian Institute in Oxford, founded to prepare trainee Civilians for life in India. He wrote for
The Times
. In planning his history on a monumental scale, Hunter confronted head-on the issue of India's place in the imperial story. The aim, he told his agent, was to show that the growth of British India ‘stands out as an epic of the British nation – the fibre of its fibre, the express image of its innermost character…[I]t will make the world understand the British race – adventurous, masterful, patient in defeat and persistent in…its designs.’
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These qualities had made England ‘the residuary legatee of the inheritance painfully amassed by Europe in Asia’.
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It was, perhaps, no accident that, as the Civilians came under challenge in India, the value of
their
rule to Britain's imperial system, and its legitimacy as an authentic expression of the British genius, were reiterated more and more vehemently by the officials themselves and by their political allies at home – and by no one more eloquently than Lord Curzon whose
The Place of India in the Empire
(1909) was a sustained plea to acknowledge that Britain without India would be a third-class power. In retrospect, we can see that this whole vast literary enterprise was part of the secret of Anglo-India's tenacious grip on the British imagination, unmatched by any other dependency. Of course, it had also its unofficial laureate of genius in Kipling. And ironically its tropes, values and categories exerted a persistent fascination for Indians themselves. Yet, ultimately, its political survival depended upon brokering the rival demands of the British at home and its indigenous subjects. The Civilian Raj had to persuade British opinion that it was indispensable and Indian opinion that it was irremovable. But, as India's imperial value rose and the stresses of its commercial, strategic and cultural entanglement with Britain were felt more deeply in the sub-continent, the position of this foreign ruling elite was bound to grow more vulnerable to criticism and more open to attack.

For the moment, however, ‘Anglo-India’ seemed an essential partner in the late Victorians’ imperial enterprise. Indian unity was becoming more urgent, for commercial and strategic reasons. The Civilian Raj looked its best guarantee. Tariff-free access was becoming more vital. The Civilians would, grudgingly, maintain it. Indian revenues must be driven up to match the rising cost of imperial defence and expenditure in the localities held down. What other regime would match the fiscal parsimony of the Civilians’ localised despotism? For their part, the Civilians resented the escalating demands imposed by London on their brittle system. They contested the issue of tariffs and the burden of military costs – but only so far.
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The concession they won in return was to be free to fashion a political system that paid scant regard to the shibboleths of Liberal Britain. They repudiated representative government (except in a grossly bowdlerised form), the market economy (through restraints on the sale of land) and liberal individualism (in favour of caste, religious or tribal identity). To some disgruntled observers, the Civilians’ aim was to make parliamentary control from Britain a nullity and rule without restraint. And, to some, they had already achieved this goal. For William Wedderburn, himself a former Civilian, but now a supporter of Congress and an MP, the Secretary of State, far from being the master of the official hierarchy in India, was only its ‘mouthpiece and champion…the apologist of all official acts’.
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The political struggle in India between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War thus had implications that went far beyond conceding greater representation to the gentlemanly nationalists of the Indian National Congress. It was really a struggle between rival groups for the support of imperial Britain in ruling India. It was a struggle between the Civilians’ ‘Anglo-India’ and the ‘British Indians’ of the Congress who were determined to supplant it. For the Civilians it was vital to maintain their status as the indispensable collaborators, and to preserve the wide freedoms this had brought them. To dissuade their London ‘partners’ from any backsliding, they must meet Britain's requirements in India and pay the ‘imperial dividend’. They must polish the image of Indian contentment and repress disorder. Above all, they must discredit any rival claiming a real share in governing the sub-continent. They had, in short, to find a means of adapting India to its changing place in the imperial system without pulling up the roots of their Civilian Raj.