A History of Britain, Volume 3 (34 page)

Even the most swollen-headed imperialist was not such a fool as to need reminding by the likes of Kipling that all this too, some day, would pass. But that day, surely, was a long, long way off. On the evening of Curzon’s installation in Calcutta there was a viceregal banquet and ball. George wore a mantle of sky blue silk. ‘The message is carved granite,’ he wrote, ‘it is hewn in the rock of doom, that our work is righteous and it shall endure.’

So when the queen passed away in January 1901, Curzon lost no time in commissioning a great monument to her memory. It would be, he told the committee responsible for drafting designs, ‘a standing record of our wonderful history, a visible monument of Indian glories and an illustration more eloquent than any spoken address or printed page, of the lessons of public patriotism and civic duty’. It would, in fact, be the British Taj Mahal. The Taj was much on Curzon’s mind since it had been he who had made it beautiful again. He had cleared out the bazaars in front of it and restored Shah Jehan’s exquisite reflecting pools. The Calcutta Victoria Memorial Monument would also have water gardens and it would even be faced with marble drawn from the same Makrana quarries in Rajasthan that had supplied the stone for the Taj. But there the resemblance would stop. The Taj Mahal was often called a poem in stone; the perfect lament of an imperial widower. But Curzon was not interested in architectural sorrow. His building would be more in the way of a proclamation. As befitted the heirs to the Mughals, there would be references to their architecture and subtle allusions to Hindu temple vernacular. But the overwhelming impression that the building would give, expressed in dome and colonnades, would be of an edifice built by the Romans of the modern age; the carriers of a civilization supported by wisdom and engineered for justice and progress. It must have seemed right, then, to entrust much of the building to Vincent Esch, whose reputation had been built as assistant chief engineer to the Bengal and Nagpur Railway.

Ground was broken in 1904. Two years later the most uncompromising, brilliant and adamant of India’s viceroys was gone, leaving behind at Government House an ornate £50,000 electric lift (still in working order today) and a government in Bengal that was almost completely broken down by riots, strikes and boycotts. Curzon’s lordly plan to partition Bengal had raised a hornets’ nest of discontent. ‘Hundreds of poor ignorant natives are being paid to hold up placards (frequently upside down) with English inscriptions painted upon them in Calcutta’ was his patrician dismissal of the mass agitation. But his authority had been broken by it all the same. Arriving as the epitome of benevolent
autocracy,
the viceroy who worked 14 hours a day, who prided himself on knowing everything from the price of rice in Madras to the number of chickens ordered for a state dinner (always too many!), Curzon left in impotent, exhausted dismay, pursued by shouts of ‘Bande mataram!’ (Hail motherland!), the first great slogan of the movement for
swaraj
or self-rule. This is how the endgame of the empire would play out: grandeur mocked by chaos. By the time that the British vision of a great new capital city at Delhi had been realized by Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens in 1921, and the Victoria Memorial Monument in Calcutta had been completed, the writing was already on the wall for the Raj. The incoming viceroy, Lord Irwin, would be greeted (like his successors, Lords Minto and Hardinge) with a bomb. He would survive, but illusions of benevolent imperial endurance would not.

Even in 1901, there had been those who had their doubts about whether a British pseudo-Taj was, in fact, the best way for the revenues of India to be spent. In the same year that Curzon announced the grandiose project, the medical journal
The Lancet
– not given to incendiary statements – lamented that during the previous decade the excess deaths (over the usual high rates) in India from famine and disease had been at least 19 million, or, as the journal expressed it, the equivalent of half the population of the United Kingdom. The horrifying famine that had gripped western and central India in 1899–1900 had taken, according to a reliable modern historian, Burton Stein, at least 6.5 million lives (W. Arthur Lewis puts it at more like 10 million). In 1901 alone a quarter of a million, mostly in and around Bombay, had died from bubonic plague. In 1903, during the staging of the durbar that proclaimed Edward VII as Emperor of India, Lalmohan Ghosh, the president of the Indian National Congress, asked rhetorically, ‘Do you think that any administration in England, France or the United States would have ventured to waste vast sums of money on an empty pageant when Famine and Pestilence are stalking over the land and the Angel of Death was flapping his wings almost within hearing of the light-hearted revellers?’

By the time Curzon’s viceroyalty ended in 1905, 3 million had perished from that epidemic. Cholera had taken an even more savage toll. Even average Indian death rates, which in the 1880s had been at the already shocking level of 41.3 per 1000, had risen, by the time the Memorial Monument was completed, to 48.6 per 1000. So the period when its triumphalists were boasting most noisily of the material and medical benefits that the British had brought to the subcontinent happened also to be the decades when India experienced the most horrific death-toll in its entire modern history. In the regions most stricken by the
turn-of-the-century
droughts and epidemics, like Orissa, Gujarat, Rajasthan and the United Provinces, they reached over 90 per 1000, or one in 11 of the population. An earlier famine in Orissa in 1865–6 had, according to government sources, killed fully a quarter of the population. And there is, of course, no memorial to those victims. But if you look carefully at the statuary in front of the Victoria Memorial you will find grateful natives being succoured at the breast of the Mother Raj.

What in God’s name had happened? The white sahibs and memsahibs who sat at their desks, played out their chukkas, danced and drank in the clubs, lorded it in the courts, gathered the revenues, built the railways and extolled the blessings they had brought were not monsters of hard-hearted callousness. They had – most of them – only the very best of intentions. They shared Curzon’s confidence that the British Empire was the greatest the world had ever seen. Its splendour was, its celebrants believed, to be measured not by square miles or millions of subjects, still less by battleships and Gatling guns, but by its incontrovertible altruism. There was indeed money to be made, and the Russian bear to be kept from getting his hairy paws on it. But what was that beside the noble dedication to eradicating poverty, disease and ignorance, which was the truly British imperial mission? Peoples whose worlds had been crippled by those maladies for who knew how long (it was invariably a much shorter time than the British supposed) would be healed. India would one day rise and walk again on its own two feet and be judged (by the British) capable once more of governing itself. On that great day of magnanimous self-liquidation, the ‘heaven-born’ (as the Indian Civil Service liked to call itself) would depart in peace leaving its erstwhile charges grateful, devoted, peaceful, prosperous and – this was the special bonus for that future modern world – free. Long after it had gone, historians would pronounce the world to have been a better place for the existence of the British Empire.

That, at any rate, was the idea of ‘trusteeship’: the vision that was habitually recited to justify the immense military, tax and economic juggernaut that described the reality of the late Victorian empire. There is no doubt that those ideals were sincerely held; even as their realization was constantly thwarted and, in the end, indefinitely postponed. There is equally no doubt that it seldom occurred to the governors of the empire (although it certainly did to its adversaries) that their military and economic power had actually caused many, if not most, of the problems they claimed to be in India to correct. The conditions in which British ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ were introduced were, at the same time, the conditions that doomed them to failure. During Curzon’s own viceroyalty,
4
per cent of India’s revenues were spent on public works such as irrigation and nearly 35 per cent on the army and police. None of this means, however, that those ideals were, from the beginning, a fig-leaf for economic and military despotism. The liberal promise of shared betterment without bloodshed, of the evolution of self-government through educated citizenship (as pertinent, its champions believed, for the fate of Britain as for the colonies), remains, arguably, one of the nobler wrecks of western optimism. Its submerged ruins still lie deep in the modern consciousness, sending up ripples of pride or guilt to the surface of contemporary British life. At the very least, then, no account of British history, however provisional, can avoid diving into the depths to see through the murk what happened: just how the good ship ‘Victoria’ ran aground.

The launch, at least, was ebullient. In 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay, who had been born with the 19th century, was still a historian in the making. The dazzling essayist for the
Edinburgh Review
, social lion of fashionable Whig society in London, precocious parliamentary orator and MP for the newly enfranchised manufacturing borough of Leeds decided that, considering he had just £700 in the bank, he was in need of a decidedly bigger fortune. The place to get one, as any fool knew, was India. Not that he was himself going into business – although, of course, there were many perfectly splendid people in Leeds whose occupation that was. His purpose, rather, was to earn £10,000 a year by bringing Progress to benighted Asia.

In 1833 parliament had finally liquidated the commercial side of the East India Company. What profits were to be made from indigo, sugar, cotton and the only steadily lucrative business of the time, narcotics (opium traded to China in return for tea), would henceforth be harvested by private traders. The ‘Company’ was now candidly what for many generations it had actually been, a tax-and-war machine, or, as it liked to think of itself, a government. As a member of the ‘Board of Control’ – the body answerable to parliament and co-governing India with the Company’s Court of Directors – it fell to Macaulay to justify the Whig government’s policy in the Commons. The prospect, despite Macaulay’s reputation as the ‘Burke of the age’, was not one that packed the benches. (‘Dinner bell’ Burke had himself often emptied them, of course.) On 10 July 1833, speaking to a chamber only a third full, Macaulay delivered his vision of British responsibility to India. It was a performance of stirring, Ciceronian eloquence in which, however, ignorance competed with arrogance. But it was, none the less, the manifesto of the liberal empire of good intentions. Even as Macaulay charted the beginning of the enterprise, he looked forward to its gloriously disinterested end:

It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having been instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own. The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.

The long march that England had undertaken from Magna Carta to the 1832 Reform Act (and that would go on until all Britain’s people were educated into citizenship) could, and would, God willing, be reproduced in Asia. The British Empire, like that of the Romans, might be in the road-building enterprise but no road would be finer, straighter – or longer – than the road to parliamentary nationhood. Moreover, the economic beauty of this empire would be the fit of its interlocking parts, just like the industrial machinery that Macaulay found so inspiring. Taking the ‘indolent’ and ‘superstitious’ Orient and giving it a good shaking-up through British law, education, light taxes and honest administration would supply the stability necessary for the religion of Progress to take hold. Under the protection of such government peace would break out and urban markets would flourish. No longer held to ransom by armed brigands and rapacious, corrupt tax collectors, the ‘cultivators’ would have some incentive to produce for those markets. And as their income kept pace with rising urban demand, their ability to introduce ‘improvements’ would make them still more productive. Up and up they would go, manuring their way to prosperity, just like their counterparts in Norfolk. Cash crops would yield surpluses that would be exported, not least to the mother country. In return Britain would send its textiles and its machinery, its plumply studded sofas and its damask drapes to India where they would find a ready market among all these thriving merchants and Turnip Singhs. With greater ‘ease’ (as the Victorians liked to put it) would come
even
more demand for cultural goods and services – colleges; newspapers; in the fullness of time, parliaments; even, dare one hope, True Religion. The entire project as Macaulay sketched it in his brightly reasoning imagination – taking ‘inert’ Asia (another favourite cliché) and injecting it with the dynamism of progress – flooded him with exhilaration. Bradford broadcloth, Sheffield cutlery and Bombay readers of the
Edinburgh Review
were just around the corner, he felt sure.

In February 1834, two weeks before embarking on the four-month voyage to India, his chests packed with the kind of things he judged really indispensable in the tropics – 300 oranges and the complete works of Homer, Horace, Gibbon and Voltaire – Macaulay treated the electors of Leeds to some parting words. Half valediction, half benediction, they offered both a blessing from the Church of Irrevocable Progress and a headmasterly reassurance that this was All for the Best. Be of good cheer, was the general drift; you are not losing your MP but gaining the world: