A History of Britain, Volume 3 (44 page)

The proclamation of 1 November 1858, which ended the existence of the East India Company and put British India under the direct rule of the queen’s government, with a viceroy, a council and a secretary of state, made a special point of promising to respect the religions and traditions of India. Canning took the proclamation seriously enough to embark on a long progress through the subcontinent, accompanied by a retinue of military magnificence, holding canopied durbar assemblies, distributing the newly created Star of India to local notables and doing everything in his power to make a personal viceregal bond with the rajahs, nizams and maharajahs. More importantly, he restored the right of childless native rulers to adopt heirs, even insisting that the Maharajah of Mysore do so at once.

The Mutiny, then, produced an extraordinary about-face in the official attitude of the British towards the most important colony in the empire. Instead of dreams of Westernization a more frankly conservative principle was now followed, which conceded that India would not and could not be modernized in a generation or two; and that the first obligation of a government was to make sure that its own society and institutions were healthy and above all free from sedition. The change of mind was more than a little schizophrenic. Trevelyan, who returned to India in 1859 to be governor of Madras and immediately get himself into trouble protesting at the attempt by the new central government to impose income tax, had established the principle that positions in the Indian Civil Service would be open to competition without distinction of race. The reality, of course, was that no Indian, however hard he tried to turn himself into the ‘brown Englishman’ of Macaulay’s fantasy, however well he learned his Milton and his Shakespeare, ever got near any of the responsible (as distinct from menial) judicial, police or fiscal appointments for many generations. The universalist assumption of the Enlightenment that all men, given the right education, could become much the same had been replaced by the harder, ‘scientific’ fact of incommensurable difference;
it
was put most brutally in the 1890s by one viceroy the Earl of Elgin, who jovially complained what ‘a terrible business [it is] this living among inferior races’.

Although the success stories of British India in the second half of the century were mostly urban ones, the prevailing attitude of its rulers, from successive viceroys after Canning (with the significant exception of the liberal Lord Ripon) right down to district collectors, was that cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, with their swarms of clerks, merchants, doctors and over-literate, under-employed intellectuals, had become mongrel places, neither of one culture nor the other. The ‘real’ India, on the other hand, was out there in the countryside with the water buffalo. Urban India was beginning to run by the clock; a tick-tock India full of all those ‘little’ men (they were always ‘little’ in sahib-speak) in steamy, sweaty, monsoon-muddy, busy-busy Bombay and Calcutta with their spectacles, fob watches and umbrellas, always fretting about timetables, the post, the trains and the ferries – and always being late; the clerks with grimy collars; the doctors who knew too much for their own and their patients’ good; the yappy ‘little’ journalists with their self-important third-hand parroted liberal opinions; the jumped-up johnny book-lawyers who made themselves such damned nuisances in the magistrates’ court. ‘Out there’, ‘up country’ and ‘in the hills’ was ‘timeless’ India (the one thing India has never been, in fact, is timeless). They called it primordial, ‘immense’ and ‘magnificent’ – another favourite word used with equal passion for the moustaches of a maharajah or the Himalayas seen from Simla.

The main chance for commercial photographers, like the inexhaustible Samuel Bourne (of the famous Bourne and Shepherd studio), was now not the documentary record of cities smashed by shells but the creation of what they themselves called the ‘Indian picturesque’ – exactly akin to the English ‘discovery’ in the late 18th century of noble ethnic remnants in the remote corners of Britain. The topography of this tropical picturesque was just the same as it had been in the Hebrides and the Peak District: dramatic waterfalls and ancient eroded cliffs, with jungly temples taking the place of ruined abbeys and the scenery generally edited to exclude the actual people who lived there – skinny things who failed to live up to the Romantic idealization, but might occasionally be included as indicators of scale. Where once the ‘savage’ races of India had been seen as target opportunities for the civilizing and Christianizing mission they were now looked on by ethnographers as treasures to be preserved in all their wild and, in the notorious case of the Andaman islanders, naked innocence. Uncovered breasts began to appear in photographs of tribal women in the 1880s. Most spectacular of all were the
portrait
studies, many of them dramatically executed, of the Indian nobility: boy princes in jewelled turbans; swarthy Rajput warriors; plump and perfumed sybarites swelling luxuriantly against the silk. Many of them sported the insignia of the Star of India, the symbol of the queen’s compact to preserve them in all their finery on condition of their absolute loyalty. A generation or two earlier, this was precisely the India that British reformers had declared must be roused from its ‘sloth’ and ‘inertia’. After the energy of the Mutiny a little inertia didn’t seem such a bad idea. Let India move at its own tempo: the speed of an elephant’s walk. Let
us
do the bustling.

Seen from the cool distance of a century and a half, it is easy to spot an extraordinary self-deception on the part of the sahibs in this turn towards neo-feudal exoticism. The reality of British power in India was coming to depend more, not less, on the world of the great port cities they had created; on the ruthless exploitation of plantation economies in Assam and Burma for teak, mahogany, tea and the always tempting though seldom reliable indigo (with chemical dyes it would fade altogether); on the mesh of connections that brought together Indian entrepreneurs with the British bankers, shippers and insurance men who made the import-export businesses tick along. The ‘jumped-up’ urban
babus
and
bhadralok
whose pretensions the sahibs found so offensive or comical were precisely the people on whose custom the booming British export business was coming to depend.

But then, that self-deception was exactly of a piece with the way that late Victorian Britain – or some of its most powerful spokesmen – reacted to their own industrial society. The empire that had been designed as an integral piece of the economic design of greater Britain now became culturally something like its opposite just at the moment when that heavy investment was at last beginning to pay off. This disconnection between economic reality and social perception was one of the defining peculiarities of modern Britain. Those who ran the empire, especially the new Indian Raj, were no longer the orientalists and knowledge technicians who had come from Fort William and Haileybury in the first generations. They were now the ‘manly’ (the most over-used term of the imperial elite) and chivalric products of the Rugby headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold’s school of modern altruism: sworn to inflexible justice and military self-sacrifice. Over-intellectualism was despised and suspected, whether among Their Own Sort or (especially) among the subject races. Their ethos was of fatherly, headmasterly sternness.

The politician who – though certainly neither fatherly nor head-masterly himself – did most to perpetuate what was essentially a fantastic,
rather
than realistic, vision of modern Britain was Benjamin Disraeli. It is often said that Disraeli was a cynic; but if so he was the most formidable kind, one who at least half believes the fantasies he manipulates. Take a look at his Buckinghamshire country house, Hughenden Manor, with its stupendous over-decoration (unerringly like Osborne House); imagine its terraces full of peacocks, and the sense of Disraeli the sorcerer – or ‘magician’, as his friends and enemies liked to say – becomes more plausible. One of the worst things his enemy, William Gladstone, thought up to say about Disraeli was to call him ‘Asiatic’, by which he meant constitutionally irresponsible, amoral and shamelessly devoted to pleasure, self-indulgence and dandyism. But the real magic of Disraeli’s public as well as private personality was to make precisely these human foibles and imperfections the mark, not of the foreigner but of the deep-dyed Englishman. It is easy to overdo the stereotype of his exoticism. After all his father, Isaac, lived the life of a country gentleman with literary pursuits; and one of Benjamin’s brothers was a gentleman–farmer. If Disraeli himself was happy in town, he was equally happy strolling through the grounds and gardens of Hughenden, relishing his view of the Chilterns. It was not just as the aristocracy’s pet Jew – so clever, so amusing – that he returned the favour by sentimentalizing them. He genuinely believed (against what we now know to be the historical truth) that amidst what he called the ‘wreck of nations’ England’s aristocratic constitution had survived because it had always been permeable to those who sought to live by the ‘principle of our society, which is to aspire and excel’.

Was a baptized Jew leading the party of the country gentry and the Church of England less amazing than a baptized Jew who was also a romantic novelist, the author of
Tancred
? But that, of course, was precisely Disraeli’s major qualification. As a youthful member of the dissident Tory group known as Young England, and then much later in the preface to the 1870 edition of his novels, Disraeli wrote of the necessity of ‘imagination’ in British government, a quality he insisted was no less important than ‘reason’. ‘Imagination’ only made sense, though, when defined negatively. It was
against
utilitarianism, the vision of human society as a sense-receptor machine;
against
commercial and industrial materialism;
against
the individualism at the core of free-trade liberalism;
against
the monotonous ‘levelling’ of egalitarianism;
against
the relentless campaign of moral and civic self-improvement that the High Minds of liberalism were always talking about. Disraeli started nothing; but he tapped into a rich and stubborn vein of sentiment in British life that was shared to a strong extent by Queen Victoria. Instead of all the above, it valued historical memory, the textured sensibility of the past, and wanted to recycle some of it for the
future
– in the look of Gothic revival churches and in the preservation and embellishment of ceremony and ritual. It idealized country life and the old manorial relations between squire and tenant that were rapidly evaporating before the pressures of world markets; it honoured the craft workshop and the college choir. Disraeli’s way had been prepared for him by the romantic rhetoric of Edmund Burke; the massive popularity of the novels of Sir Walter Scott; the nostalgic ‘troubadour’ history paintings like Paul Delaroche’s
Lady Jane Grey
; Pugin’s mind-bogglingly profuse interior for the House of Lords; the neo-chivalric canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites; the Christian paternalism of the old Poet Laureate Wordsworth and the Arthurian idylls of the present incumbent, Tennyson. Disraeli was Carlyle with a smile; Charles Dickens with a white silk handkerchief.

It was telling that Disraeli had made his name in the 1840s as MP for Shrewsbury by taking down the cotton-manufacturer prime minister Sir Robert Peel. Peel’s assumption was that the Tory party’s future hinged on slipstreaming itself behind Britain’s laissez-faire internationalist industrialism. The ferocity of Disraeli’s attack implied something like the opposite – that the real future of the party lay not in making itself indistinguishable from Whiggishness or liberalism but in keeping faith with precisely the opposite set of values – crown, church, country (to which he would later add empire). Young England’s stance was to make the Tory leaders uneasy at being so apologetic about the institutions of which Disraeli insisted they should be boasting; not least the insular interests of Britain itself. Young England was meant to be the kiss of life for Olde England.

What seemed at the beginning to be a stance of quixotic futility turned out to be a strategy of genius; massive social self-denial turned into political paydirt. It was a theory of political action that confounded almost every other theory of 19th-century progress – not just Mill and Macaulay but Marx. Who could have imagined that, as the franchise gradually became extended, the working class whom it embraced would become interested less in political egalitarianism and more in social improvement; that they would want, not political union with their self-designated emancipators among the Liberals but cleaner water, less noisome slums (mistakenly ridiculed by Gladstone as ‘the politics of sewage’) and ra-ra British imperialism? Disraeli, however, claimed to have known this all along when, as leader of the House of Commons, he pushed through the Second Reform Act in 1867, trumping the Liberals at their own game. The working class, once admitted to the vote, he said, would not be a Trojan horse for revolution but on the contrary were Conservative in the ‘purest and loftiest’ sense, in that they were ‘proud of belonging to a great
country
and wish to maintain its greatness – that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, their empire – that they believe on the whole that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of the land’.

Cynical or not, there was at least a grain of truth in Disraeli’s intuition that when the queen protested at being addressed like a public meeting by Mr Gladstone she was voicing the irritation of millions of her subjects – from farmers to publicans. The Liberal religion, perfectly personified by Gladstone, demanded that Britons should every day do better, try harder and live more purely. But not everyone wanted to prowl the streets looking for fallen women to save; not everyone had it in them to be up and doing every blessed waking hour of the day. How the two giants of Victorian politics spent their own leisure hours says a great deal about the contrast of their personalities. When he allowed himself time off from the dispatch boxes or from translating Homer, Gladstone rolled up his sleeves and chopped down trees at his estate at Hawarden in Flintshire. A collection of his axes still exists in his ‘temple of peace’ library at Hawarden. Disraeli, on the other hand, rose at a reasonable seven-thirty in the morning, would read the newspapers and do a little government business; then he might stroll along the terrace amidst his peacocks (the perfect Disraelian bird) and peruse a few more documents between daydreams in the library, where ‘I like to watch the sunbeams on the bindings of the books’. For Gladstone, the binding was just something that held together what mattered – the contents.