Pax Britannica (30 page)

Let us, too, excuse ourselves for a moment from the order of British India, and slip across the frontier to one of the most celebrated
and colourful of the States, Jaipur—generally spelt Jeypur in those days, and lying almost in the heart of northern India, among the rocks and flaming sands of Rajputana. The Maharajah of Jaipur possessed an estate of some 15,000 square miles, with 2½ million tenants, and he governed it according to the most dashing traditions of his Rajput forebears, descended from the epic heroes of medieval India. The Muslim conquerors of India had never been able to subdue the flare of these Hindu princes, and the British Raj had scarcely toned them down.

The capital, Jaipur itself, had been planned by an eighteenth-century Maharajah of astronomical interests, Jai Singh, and it was laid out with noble precision, and plastered throughout in a soft pink. The centre of the city was occupied by the sprawl of the palace, with shaded gardens and terraced arcades, trees full of monkeys, a marble audience chamber and a majestic series of stables: the Maharajah kept rather more than a thousand horses, each with its personal groom—one eminent horse had
four
grooms. Behind the palace stood a famous Hindu temple, in front was Jai Singh’s observatory, a field of strange quadrants, pits and towers. Immensely wide streets intersected this capital, and along them the people streamed in perpetual pageantry—a cavalier citizenry; swathed about in scarlet and turbans, the men tall and handsome in a predatory style, the women slim and scrawny, jangling from head to ankle with bangles, amulets, bracelets, necklaces and gold chains, so that every movement was an orchestration, and one heard their approach in rhythmic clankings round the corner. Sometimes a gold-hung elephant trundled by, its liveried mahout high above the street crowds, and sometimes a great nobleman passed in a palanquin, with a train of servants at the trot behind. Beyond the city walls lay the ancient capital of Amber, with a deserted palace on one hill and the Maharajah’s army poised in their barracks on another: all around stretched the deserts of Rajputana, camel trains loping towards the city gates, and fluttering knots of peasants hastening to market.

No city in Asia could be much more Asian, and it was often a relief to take the train to Jaipur, when the symmetry and rectitude of British India seemed more than usually lowering, or one really could not stand another evening of bridge with the Thompsons
of Revenue Survey. But it was an illusion. Implanted deep in the heart of Jaipur was the authority of the Raj. Despite exotic appearances, the British had been the real power in Jaipur for more than sixty years. The British Resident lived in a substantial mansion conveniently close to the Rustom Family Hotel, and it was to his office that one applied for permission to travel about the State, view its antiquities, or do business with its merchants. He would issue passes to view the Maharajah’s stables (the English trainer there had, of course, been appointed with his approval). He would arrange introductions to notables of Jaipur. If one wished to visit Amber, the Resident would, ‘as a rule, kindly ask the State to send an elephant to meet the traveller’.

The handful of Englishmen living in Jaipur had, under the patronage of the Maharajah, left a characteristic mark upon the place. ‘The Maharajah gave the order’, said Kipling of the lovely palace pleasure gardens, ‘and Yakub Sahib made the garden’—Yakub Sahib being a Mr Jacob, of a well-known Anglo-Indian name. Two Englishmen had built the vast and awful museum, named the Albert Hall and surrounded by ornamental gardens, and an Englishman ran it. Englishmen managed the State railways, manned the electric light plant, trained the Maharajah’s forces, and in the centre of the public gardens stood a large statue of Lord Mayo, Viceroy of India in the 1860s. Even if the visitor missed all these intimations of power, had no need of the Resident and evaded the Albert Hall, even so he could not ignore the hovering omnipotence of the Raj: for high and very large above the city of Jaipur the single word WELCOME had been painted in white letters on a hill, to commemorate a recent visit to this Protected Native State by Edward Prince of Wales, heir to the Queen-Empress.
1

The Viceroy knew that his was a unique imperial trust. Even in 1897, one suspects, the British might have abandoned most of the Empire with reasonable sang-froid. India was a separate case. It seemed to the British that their greatness, their wealth, even their very character depended upon the possession of this distant prodigy. India was the justification of Empire by force—the imposition of standards upon a weaker people, for their own good as well as Britain’s. ‘The true fulcrum of Asiatic dominion’, Curzon had written in 1894, ‘seems to me increasingly to lie in Hindustan’: the secret of the mastery of the world was, ‘if they only knew it, in the possession of the British people’. Since the Indian Mutiny India had seemed, too, a peculiarly royal sort of dominion. Victoria once noted in her diary, before the end of the East India Company, ‘a universal feeling that India should belong to
me
’. The British agreed with the poet William Watson, that England could never be the same without India, that brightness in her starry eyes, that splendour on her constellated brow.

India was certainly a valuable piece of property, and mostly self-sustaining, for the cost of governing and defending it was borne out of Indian taxes, and even the Indian Army, constantly though it served in imperial causes elsewhere, cost the British scarcely a penny. The British had sunk a lot of money in India—more than
£
270 million, or a fifth of their entire overseas investment—and 19 per cent of their exports went there. In the more liberal years of the century the British had often looked askance at the authoritarian rule exerted on their behalf in India. ‘Public opinion does not know what to make of it,’ Seeley had written, ‘but looks with blank indignation and despair upon a Government which seems utterly un-English, which is bureaucratic and in the hands of a ruling race, which rests mainly on military force, which raises its revenues, not in the European fashion, but by monopolies of salt and opium and by taking the place of a universal landlord, and in a hundred other ways departs from the traditions of England.’ But political values were coarser now, India did not much disturb the public conscience at home, and the Viceroy was seldom plagued by radical questions
in the House of Commons, or worse still radical parliamentarians on his doorstep. He knew that public opinion now overwhelmingly supported absolute British rule in India: there were, after all, parts of Calcutta worth
£
40,000 an acre, and one did not play fast and loose with such stakes.

Protecting the Indian stakes, indeed, was one of the prime purposes of British foreign policy. British Governments were no longer afraid that their representatives in India would break away from Whitehall’s control altogether, to set up some astonishing republic of their own. They were, though, always afraid that another Power might grab the country, or cut it off from London. Lord Rosebery once declared that British foreign policy was essentially an Indian policy, ‘mainly guided by considerations of what was best for our Indian Empire’. Certainly the creation of the new Empire in Africa was largely impelled by anxiety over the routes to India. The military planners in Simla were perpetually obsessed with the safety of this immense dominion, so thinly ruled and guarded, and in particular with the menace they supposed to come from the Russians along their northern frontiers.

Much of Victorian imperial history had depended upon the fear of Russian intentions—it was Russia, you will remember, that the music-hall audiences had in mind when they first sang the Jingo song. The most vulnerable frontier point of all lay in the north-west corner of India, in the tangled country around Afghanistan—Alexander’s gateway to India. It was a double anxiety. Afghanistan itself was a very unreliable neighbour, and the frontier area was inhabited by lawless Muslim tribes owing no very definite allegiance to anybody, and making it exceedingly difficult to establish a firm line of defence. This was the country of the Great Game. Behind it, or so the British supposed, the Russians were moving inexorably east and south, absorbing one after the other the Khans of Central Asia, and preparing the encirclement of India. They were already building a railway across Siberia to the Far East, and rumour had them railway-building in Turkestan, too, and planning an annexation of Tibet—whose southern frontier, theoretically drawn along the summits of the Himalaya, ran actually within sight of Simla. Twice Britain and Russia had almost come to blows—in 1885
the Stationery Office had gone so far as to print documents declaring a state of war. Twice the British had launched campaigns against the Afghans to secure the gap. Repeated scares and crises kept the north-west always in their minds, and rumours of Russian mayhem among the tribes percolated constantly through Simla.

The search for a ‘scientific frontier’ was endless. In the east the British had now taken all Burma, and would perhaps have moved into Siam, too, if it were not for the French in Indo-China. In the west they had wavered between standing firm on the line of the Indus, well within India proper, or pursuing a ‘forward policy’ and posting their troops as close to the Russians as possible. Sometimes they had thought the actual possession of Afghanistan necessary. Sometimes they had settled for a policy that would merely keep the Russians out of Kabul, too. They alternately occupied and withdrew from several remote outposts in the Hindu Kush: and the legend of British arms in India, fostered so brilliantly by Kipling, was born out of the rocks and wadis of the north-west, where the savage tribesmen lay in ambush behind the next rock, the Afghans brooded behind the tribes, and behind all stood the Russians.

Since 1893 the Indo-Afghan frontier had been demarcated, and the British were building up Afghanistan as a buffer State, with gifts of arms and money. At the same time they were trying for the first time to subdue the tribes who lived in semi-independence on the Indian side of the line. Roads were built, boundary posts set up, forts established throughout the territories of the Afridis, the Mahsuds, the Waziris, the people of Swat, Gilgit and Chitral. Once content with controlling the plains at the foot of the mountains, the British now intended to hold the heads of all the passes, and since 1895 Chritral, far to the north in the Hindu Kush, had been permanently garrisoned.

All this offered many excitements to the British—Anglo-Indians were often accused of fostering Russophobia at home, in order to keep the Great Game alive. The tribespeople, though, deeply resented the new interference. A holy man known to the British as the Mad Fakir, and described by Winston Churchill as ‘a priest of great age and of peculiar holiness’, travelled around inciting them to rebellion. He was helped by the news just reaching those distant provinces of Muslim triumphs elsewhere in the world: the Sultan of Turkey had
proclaimed himself Caliph, the Turks had defeated the Christian Greeks in war, the British themselves were having a difficult time against the Mahdi. There were wild stories of imperial reverses—the Suez Canal was said to have been seized by the Turks and leased to Russia—and the Mullah claimed that the Faithful could never be hurt by British bullets, and used to display a mild bruise on his own leg which he said was the only result of a direct hit from a 12 pound shell. Serious trouble was brewing on the frontier. British reinforcements were already on their way, punitive expeditions were common, dark rumours of Russian conspiracy or intervention flowed freely down to Simla.

There was a man living in the town called A. N. Jacob, a curiosity dealer, a mesmerist and a conjurer. He had been rich in his time, but had been ruined by an action he brought against the Nizam of Hyderabad, who had refused to pay for a diamond brooch Jacob had sold him. As a result he was boycotted in all the Indian States, the source of his wealth, and was reduced to a modest business with the Anglo-Indians, living in a house partly furnished with pieces from the Brighton Pavilion (the Nizam had bought them from the British Government).
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Jacob was a mysterious man, immortalized by Kipling as Lurgan Sahib in
Kim
, with his eyes whose pupils eerily closed and dilated, his genius for disguise, his strangely foreign English, his unexplained contacts with princely house and underworld, his curio shop cluttered with devil-masks, Buddhas, prayer-wheels, samovars, Persian water-jugs and spears. The simpler Indians naturally assumed this queer figure to be a magician, but the British, no less baffled, placed him in a category just as self-evident: Russian spy.
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It was a bad year in India, and the Jubilee celebrations in Simla were sadly muted. In Calcutta, the Viceroy’s other home, there had been
a terrible earthquake, causing many deaths, and so weakening the structures of the city that they dared not fire a Jubilee salute, nor even thunder out a hymn on the Cathedral organ. In Bombay there was plague. In Orissa there was famine. The frontier was aflame with tribal violence. India had just abandoned the silver standard, and was in economic difficulty. In Bengal and in Bombay there was political trouble, remote enough from the Abode of the Little Tin Gods, but serious enough to disturb the more far-sighted of the seers. There was not much air of festivity in Simla that June. Only a few parades, church services and processions of notables marked the occasion of Jubilee, and perhaps a few of the memsahibs quoted to each other, with indulgent giggles, Targo Mindien’s Diamond Jubilee Rhyme: