Pax Britannica (29 page)

The English in Simla knew each other, for the most part, all too well. They had grown up together in the imperial service, and they had few illusions about each other or each other’s wives. It was the outsiders who were taken aback by the place: the Vicereines, who had often never been to India before, and generally loathed Simla, or the young girls fresh from England, to whom this high and startling place, rich with scarlet uniforms and brown young English faces, must have seemed one of the most exciting towns imaginable. Everything was overdrawn at Simla. Eight balls and dances at the Viceroy’s Lodge alone! Even the monkeys were so bold that they habitually came through people’s windows to steal fruit, and could often be heard thrumming with their feet on the iron roofs above: and constantly through the gossip and the music of the string orchestras ran the murmur of great power, a
basso
profondo
to Simla’s frivolities.
1

The British Government in India was a despotism of great efficiency, in which the Indians had virtually no say. The lower echelons of the administration were filled mostly by Indians, those babus whose humble respect, elaborate Welsh-sounding English and pitiful efforts to Westernize themselves so amused and irritated their rulers. In the middle ranks there were many Indians in minor executive positions, office superintendents, assistant secretaries, extra assistant commissioners. But the Indian Civil Service proper, the senior branch of the Government, was almost locked. Indians were free to compete in the I.C.S. entry examination, but the odds were heavily weighted against them. Their education was not geared to the examination, the papers were in English, they had to go to London to sit—the journey itself was against the tenets of Hindu orthodoxy, and some of the earliest Indian candidates dared not tell even their own parents that they were going. By 1897 only a few very clever Hindus and Parsees had managed to get in, and were acting as assistant magistrates and collectors: for the rest the I.C.S., the real Government of India, was absolutely British.

At the top of it stood the Viceroy, who combined the offices of a President and a Prime Minister, was responsible only to London, and was generally a nobleman with no previous Indian experience, appointed on political grounds for a five-year term. He enjoyed some of the privileges of an independent ruler. India decreed its own tariffs, for example—British officers arriving to serve in India had to pay customs duty on their saddlery—and in the years 1896 and 1897 there was no legislation at Westminster dealing with Indian affairs. The
Viceroy’s Council was in effect a Cabinet, and almost all its Ministers were Civil Servants, each the head of a Government department. It is true that the Commander-in-Chief attended as an extra member, and that sometimes the Viceroy, by summoning a dozen extra members, turned the Council into a legislative assembly, when the public was admitted to its sessions, and sat on a row of dining-room chairs. But the Viceroy could override its decisions anyway, and the power of the bureaucracy remained unchallenged.

Defence, foreign affairs, national finance, the railways, posts and telegraphs were all looked after by this Central Government. In other ways India was administered by the provincial governments, no less completely in the hands of the I.C.S. The seven provinces were run almost as separate States. Two of them, the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay, had kept not only their pre-Mutiny titles, but also the right to communicate directly with London, without reference to the Viceroy, who sometimes heard what was happening there only by reading the newspapers. The provinces had been carved out, by history and politics, in shapes that bore little relation to geography, ethnography, or even language, and they had been disciplined into entities by the British. In each the head of the administration—Governor, Lieutenant-Governor or Chief Commissioner—had his own council of Civil Servants and nominated legislature, and the system of government was elaborate. In Bombay, for example, there were departments of Public Works, Justice, Land Records, Municipality and Cantonments, Revenue Survey, Politics, Education, Police, Forests, Medicine, Finance, Gaols, Posts, Telegraphs, Customs, Salt, Opium, Excise, Income Tax, Stamps and Stationery, Registration, besides a Marine Department, an Archaeological Survey, an Inspectorate of Steam Boilers and Prime Movers, and a Directorate of the Government Observatory. All these departments had British chiefs: multiply them by eight or nine, and you will have some idea how many positions of great administrative authority were held by Englishmen in the India of the nineties.

Every I.C.S. man first went through the mill of the districts. India’s provinces were subdivided into some 250 districts, each presided over by an officer called sometimes a collector-magistrate, sometimes a deputy commissioner. The district was the basic
administrative unit of British India, and it was complete in itself, its head being responsible for almost anything that happened in it. He was the local representative of the Crown: all over India, on Jubilee Day, the district officers held their own local Durbars, and received their local notables, the petty chieftains, the Brahmins or the great landlords, graciously in a marquee on behalf of the Queen-Empress. The district officer was also the tax official, which is why he was sometimes called a collector. ‘The main work of the Indian Administration’, it was officially declared, ‘is the assessment of the land tax’, the chief source of revenue, and the man in the district spent much of his time inspecting crops, checking measurements, allotting ownerships and listening to the arguments of rival landlords. He was at once the chief of police and the chief magistrate of the district, a combination that was often criticized. On most working days of the week he presided over his court, sometimes in a musty town courthouse, blazing hot and bursting to the doors, sometimes in a tent in the field, with prisoners and litigants loitering on the grass outside, and a stream of spectators wandering in twos and threes from the village along the track.

Such a camp court was everybody’s image of the White Man’s Burden. The magistrate was often absurdly young, and his court equipment consisted of a couple of camp chairs and a collapsible desk. On the ground before it his clerks sat cross-legged, each with an inkhorn, and at the door his orderly stood peremptorily on guard, dressed in a scarlet coat and sash. Into this simple setting, the furthest and humblest preliminary to the Privy Council, filed the prisoners and the applicants, bowing low to the representative of the Raj—villains in irons, deputations of villagers, people who wanted to argue about the water rates, or demanded an audit of the village accounts, or accused their neighbours of witchcraft, or thought they were entitled to a rebate of last year’s land tax—murderers occasionally, thieves nearly always, deserted soldiers, poor old women with no visible means of support, lost children and argumentative local lawyers. The district officer must have answers for them all. The clerks scratched away in their big books; the orderly ushered them in with pompous command, like a sergeant-major; and when the court was over the district officer and his staff packed up the desk,
the chairs, the tent and the law books in camel carts, and plodded across the plains to the next session.

So from top to bottom, Viceregal Lodge to portable courthouse, the Indian Civil Service ruled India. This was a land of fabulous variety, a world of its own. At least 800 languages were spoken there, including tongues like Karen, Mon, Shan, Bhil, Garo and Halbi, which not more than a handful of scholars elsewhere in the world had ever had the opportunity to learn. There were 9 million Indians classed still as aborigines, and there was a dizzy profusion of more advanced minorities: jangling stalwarts from the Rajput States, noble Sikhs from the north, the clever and disputatious Bengalis, Pathan warriors from the north-west frontier, people from Assam, Sikkim and Bhutan with a Mongol slant to their eyes, exquisitely fragile Dravidians from the south, strange men from the distant Andamans, the Nicobars, the Shan Hills or Baluchistan. Across this marvellous country the inflexible order of the I.C.S. was laid, province by province, the whole governed by an all-embracing code of rules, moving to a sure and tested rhythm of novitiate, experience, promotion and protocol. Mahatma Gandhi called the I.C.S. ‘the most powerful secret corporation the world has ever known’, and in India as a whole it had acquired a prestige so towering that to many simple people it seemed infallible, if not divine.

The Central Government of this system was heavily formal, rigid with bureaucracy and protocol—‘Do you know Mrs Herbert of Public Works? the Anglo-Indian hostesses used to say. ‘May I introduce Miss Entwhistle of Irrigation?’ The I.C.S. had not much changed its method for half a century, and its main arteries were a little clogged. Its duties were much wider than the duties of a contemporary Government at home: in some ways India was almost a Socialist country, so involved was the State in matters like landownership, transport, forestry, education, medicine and police work, and in running the official monopolies of salt and opium. All this led to a vast subsidiary establishment—there were nearly 3 million employees in the public service—and a proliferation of paper work. 
Life was short in India, transfers from office to office were frequent, and the only way of maintaining continuity seemed to be to write everything down. On the Indian trains the ticket collecter wrote down the number of your ticket on a piece of paper, to be consigned eventually, with millions more, to Heaven knows what mysterious and meaningless archive. Everybody made fun of the bumbling bureaucracy of Simla, even sometimes its own bureaucrats, so seriously did it take itself.

In theory there was almost no contingency for which the files did not provide a precedent, or the regulations decree a solution. Take, for example, the regulations laid down for Joining Time, the time allowed to an officer to proceed from one station to another, when he was transferred, ‘Joining Time is calculated as follows, subject to a maximum of 40 days. (Sundays not actually spent in travelling are not included in the calculation.) Six days for preparation, and in addition thereto, for the portion of the journey which the Officer travels, or might travel, a day for each: by railway, 200 miles, by Ocean Steamer, 150 miles, River Steamer 80 miles, Mail Cart or other public stage conveyance drawn by horse, 80 miles, or any other way, 15 miles, or any longer time actually occupied in the journey. During that time the Officer will draw pay or salary which he drew in his old appointment, or that which he will draw on joining his new appointment, whichever may be less.’

In the field the system was far more flexible. Though India had a surfeit of senior British officials, the British cadre as a whole was very small. There were perhaps 20,000 Britons in India in the nineties, not counting soldiers of the British forces stationed there. About half were business people, and another 3,000 British officers of the Indian Army. A few hundred Britons worked in the lower ranks of the public service, as engine drivers, port technicians, postmasters. There remained some 1,300 British members of the I.C.S., upon whose shoulders rested the responsibility for governing 300 million souls. At the centre all might be done by the book. On the perimeters the district officer generally had to make up his own mind, without reference to precedent or senior opinion—in Mymensingh, East Bengal, one district officer was responsible for 6,000 square miles of territory and 4 million people, which left him little time for
consultation. In dealing with sudden emergencies, in arbitrating unexpected disputes, in instant decisions on matters of life and death, the British ruler of India was expected to obey his common sense, and do what he thought was right in the long run—fortified as he was by those values of manly self-reliance without which the Indian Civil Service would probably never have accepted him in the first place.

But however original the young officers in the field, the Raj did emanate a certain worthy dullness. Nearly every visitor felt it, and contrasted it ruefully with that gift for graceful hedonism and skullduggery which legend had long since bestowed upon the early adventurers of British India. Fortunately for the dazzle of India, not so far from any district officer’s bungalow there was sure to be a Native State, where Joining Time did not apply, and the public school code was not so scrupulously enforced. When they talked of British India then they were not merely blowing a trumpet. India was all red on the map, but redder in some parts than others, for embedded in the whole were more than 600 Native States in whose territories the British did not directly govern. India and British India meant two different things. In British India the Queen’s rule was direct to the point of starkness. In the Native States—generally those which had submitted peacefully to the Raj, instead of fighting back—the British had tried their first experiments in indirect rule.

The States varied in size from villages to nations. They contained 77 million inhabitants altogether, about a quarter of the whole, and by the nature of British history in India only a few insignificant States possessed an outlet to the sea. The Raj fenced them in. Ostensibly they were independent Powers, really they were puppets, whose rulers would be rash indeed to disregard the wishes of the Raj, and in whose capital there lived a British Resident or Adviser, in a palace of his own, as a reminder of the power behind the throne. This was described as being governed ‘with the help, and under the advice, of a British political officer’, and it was said that while some of the States were almost completely independent, ‘others
require more assistance or stricter control’. It was largely the presence of these princely feudatories, vast and rich like Mysore and Hyderabad, petty and indigent like Thonk, which gave to India still some of the surprise and splendour of the Moguls, with their caparisoned elephants and their jewelled audience chambers.

The authority of each prince, we are told, was limited by his treaties with the suzerain Government, which ‘interferes when any chief misgoverns his people; rebukes, and if needful, removes the oppressor; protects the weak; and firmly imposes peace upon all’. The treaties varied from State to State. Mysore, which was advanced enough to have a kind of Parliament, agreed simply to ‘act in conformity with the advice of the Resident in all important matters’. Lesser States, nearly all medieval autocracies, found their obligations spelt out in fussier detail. They could not, for example, employ British subjects without the sanction of the British Government, and British applicants for jobs were carefully screened for subversive tendencies. Governesses for princely households were actually supplied by the Raj, for part of the system was an imperial grooming of young princes. Often this was astonishingly successful. Moulded by nannies, tutors, advisers, the example of visiting officials and perhaps the schooling of Eton and Oxford, many of the princes became quasi-Englishmen themselves—English aristocrats buffed to an oriental polish. Such a magnificent heightening of their own taste much appealed to the English, who greatly coveted invitations to the grander Indian principalities, to shoot tiger or play polo. It was Sir Roper Lethbridge, K.C.I.E., who compiled
The
Golden
Book
of
India
, A Genealogical and Biographical Dictionary of the Ruling Princes, Chiefs, Nobles and Other Personages, Titled or Decorated, of the Indian Empire—‘probably destined to take rank’,
The
Times
said, ‘as the recognized
Peerage
of
India
’. Life in the States appealed to the Indians, too. The administration was generally shaky, and personal liberties could be precarious, but there was a steady flow of immigrants out of British India into the Native States—some escaping to easier penal systems, but many just pining for colour, variety and a little inconsequence.