The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (36 page)

Reform was thus the goad for Civilian reassertion. Sir George Chesney, one of the committee that had drafted the councils scheme, made a blunt avowal. In the third edition of his
Indian Polity
(1894), he rejected the schemes of Congress as ‘absurd’.
⁵⁸
His book was a forceful restatement of the need to entrench the autonomy of the Civilians, as much from Whitehall and Westminster as from Indian opinion. Another old India hand, Sir William Hunter, was sympathetic to Congress but dismissed the ‘numerical principle of representation’.
⁵⁹
Among the senior Civilians in India, insistence upon the ethnic (and thus ineradicable) basis of India's social divisions, and the incompatibility of the caste system with any form of representative government, became the hallmark of the new official scholarship. Ethnographic and census studies along these lines made Herbert Risley a rising star in the 1890s.
⁶⁰
In the Punjab, where large-scale irrigation works were forming a new ‘hydraulic society’ in the ‘canal colonies’,
⁶¹
the dominant school among the Civilians insisted on the ‘tribal’ basis of rural society and the need to prevent urban and commercial castes from buying land and social influence in the countryside.
⁶²
Elsewhere in India, the Civilians actively sought new allies among the provincial elites.
⁶³
In North India, the ‘Mutiny syndrome’ could still be readily invoked.
⁶⁴

The lesson of all this was clear enough. The Civilians were determined to challenge what they saw as the absurd and potentially dangerous pretensions of the anglo-literate elite to be representative of India at large. Opinion at home had to be reminded of Indian ‘realities’; and Indian politics corrected to put the Congress in its place. Lord Elgin was too much a Gladstonian to be sympathetic. But his successor as Viceroy (in 1899), Lord Curzon, brought a different outlook. Curzon was of landed family but modest means. He had made his way by academic talent, intense ambition, hard work and a ready pen. In the early 1890s, he had entered politics with a reputation for expert knowledge of Asia, especially of Central Asia and Persia (Iran) where Anglo-Russian competition was greatest. He was the protege of Lord Salisbury whom he served at the Foreign Office.
⁶⁵
By 1898–9, Salisbury was deeply alarmed by Russia's diplomatic advance towards India. A Viceroy in tune with his thinking and with Curzon's local knowledge would secure London's grip on Indian frontier policy. By an added irony, Curzon was also expected (in London) to bring a more sympathetic and imaginative approach to Indo-British relations and soften the rule of the dour Civilians.

As Salisbury had intended, Curzon brought to India an intense concern for its central Asian borderlands – the viewpoint of a Mughal emperor. It was a crucial change of perspective. Like some latter-day Mughal, Curzon saw Indian politics as the rightful preserve of princes and landowners bound by neo-feudal allegiance to the imperial crown. He attached great importance to the education and training of the princes as a governing class in imperial service.
⁶⁶
‘The native chief’, he said, is ‘my colleague and partner.’
⁶⁷
India's vast treasury of ruins, monuments, forts and palaces excited his imagination. Curzon had a life-long passion for architecture as the visual key to both history and politics. To maintain and restore the monuments of India was to link the Raj to its Mughal past not to ‘
babu
’ modernity. To build new landmarks – like the Victoria Memorial Hall on the Calcutta maidan – was to make the imperial monarchy (and not the British Parliament) the focus of Indian loyalty.
⁶⁸

Curzon's strategic preoccupations and his ‘Mughalist’ outlook chimed well with the Civilians’ wish to curb the ambitions of the Congress politicians. Curzon was readily persuaded that the inroads of
babu
politics must now be reversed, and nowhere more urgently than in Bengal on the doorstep of the Indian government. The opening salvoes were directed at two bastions of
bhadralok
influence: the Calcutta city government and Calcutta University. The elected majority on the Calcutta Corporation was removed. The autonomy of the University was cut down.
⁶⁹
But the Civilians’ real target was the Bengal Legislative Council and the growing
bhadralok
influence in provincial and All-India politics. They found a neat, if drastic, solution. The sprawling Bengal Presidency had long been the target for administrative surgery. It was over-centralised in Calcutta. Oriya-speakers in the west and Muslims in the east were no match for Calcutta Hindus in catching the attention of government. Assam, separated in 1874, was too small to maintain its own cadre of Civilians. The administrative answer had always been to divide Bengal. Now there was the will to do so. There was little doubt about the motive. ‘Bengal united is a power’, remarked Risley, now (as Home Secretary) the director of political strategy. ‘Bengal divided will pull in several different ways. That is one of the merits of the scheme.’
⁷⁰
Curzon faithfully repeated this logic to London. ‘The Bengalis’, he told the Secretary of State,

like to think of themselves as a nation…If we are weak enough to yield to their clamour now we shall not be able to dismember or reduce Bengal again, and you will be cementing and solidifying on the eastern flank of India a force almost formidable, and certain to be an increasing trouble in the future.
⁷¹

By the time the final version of the plan was sent to London for approval, the aim of partition had become still more explicit. Calcutta, said Curzon,

is the centre from which the Congress party is manipulated throughout the whole of Bengal, and indeed the whole of India. Its best wire-pullers and its most frothy orators all reside here…They dominate public opinion in Calcutta; they affect the High Court; they frighten the Local Government; and they are sometimes not without influence on the Government of India…Any measure…that would divide the Bengali-speaking population; that would permit independent centres…to grow up; that would dethrone Calcutta from its place as the centre of successful intrigue, or that would weaken the influence of the lawyer class, who have the entire organisation in their hands, is intensely and hotly resented by them. The outcry will be very loud and very fierce.
⁷²

It was an accurate prophecy. The Bengal Congressmen and their allies elsewhere in India rightly saw the partition driven through in 1905 as a frontal attack upon the claim of the anglo-literate class to a political voice, and as a blatant attempt to stir up other religious or ethnic groups against them. To rub salt into the wound there was no pretence of consulting the legislative council: partition was by Viceregal
fiat
. The result was a furious outcry which widened steadily beyond the educated class. The
swadeshi
campaign was meant to boycott British goods (especially textiles) in favour of local products as an expression of Bengali patriotism. It was taken up by student groups and hastily formed clubs or
samitis
. Soon there were signs of its being enforced by caste associations and through coercive means.
⁷³
Marches, demonstrations and the singing of
Bande Mataram
as a national song were an open challenge to the colonial power. The Civilians grew uneasy: some had doubted the partition plan all along. But so too did their opponents. For all his outrage at the Civilians’ ploy, Banerjea drew back from a violent confrontation with the Raj. As the tempo of agitation increased, he looked instead for some accommodation with the embattled government. Relief was to come from a surprising quarter.

Curzon's endorsement of partition had sprung from his urgent geopolitical vision: of the coming struggle for Asia. Throughout his term of office, he argued fiercely for a ‘forward’ policy to contain the Russian threat and safeguard India. Pressing his views on the British cabinet, he claimed that he spoke for Indian opinion.
⁷⁴
Without India, he was to argue a few years later, Britain was scarcely a first-class power.
⁷⁵
In Curzon's geostrategic universe, it was intolerable to have Congress snapping at his heels, denouncing India's foreign wars and blaming the size and cost of the Indian army for poverty, plague and famine. If India was to take what the Viceroy saw as its rightful place in the British system, its internal politics must be brought in line with its imperial duty. But, by a painful irony (to Curzon at least), his insistence upon the imperial status of the Indian government was to bring about his downfall. Ministers in London were already annoyed by Curzon's presumption: in foreign policy they expected India to pay, to be seen but not to be heard. They resented his opposition to the appeasement of Russia. When Curzon was drawn into a bitter row with Lord Kitchener, Commander-in-Chief in India and the Empire's leading soldier, to thwart his grip on the army's bureaucracy, they gratefully accepted his over-hasty resignation. But it was not so much a change of Viceroy (in 1905) as a change of government in London that imposed a rough political truce between the Civilians and the Congress.

With the new Liberal government in London came a new Indian Secretary. John Morley had been an ardent Gladstonian, a radical and a Home Ruler. He lost no time in warning Lord Minto, Curzon's successor as Viceroy, that a large radical phalanx in the House of Commons was watching India closely.
⁷⁶
Here was a clear signal, like that in the 1880s, that the Civilians’ system must not become a ‘factory of grievances’ and that some move must be made towards ‘reform’. Morley himself began with a strong prejudice against Civilian rule. But his real target was Curzon's inadmissible claim to Indian influence in British policy and the ‘jingo’ mentality of the Civilian regime. What he cared about most, he told his closest adviser, was to ‘depose the Government of India from their usurped position of an independent power’.
⁷⁷
He himself was a fervent supporter of the entente with Russia reached eventually in 1907. ‘Forward policy’ was out of date, and with it the whole Curzonian ethos. In June 1906, six months into office, he was keen to announce reforms ‘in the popular direction’.
⁷⁸
He may have reasoned that a larger ‘popular’ element in Indian government would curb its jingoistic excesses and forestall its obstruction of a Russian entente.

Morley's enthusiasm had been heightened by the prospect of a tacit partnership with the Congress. The Congress leadership had despaired of Curzon. Even Tilak agreed that nothing could be gained by agitation in India: London was the only hope.
⁷⁹
With Curzon's fall and a new Liberal government, Gladstonian in sympathy, they hoped to turn the triangle of Anglo-Indian politics to their advantage. G. K. Gokhale, now the pre-eminent Congressman, hastened to London. In the classic language of Congress loyalism, he denounced Civilian rule and affirmed the bond of empire. Gokhale was a figure of impregnable rectitude, a ‘moderate’ who repudiated the ‘extremism’ of Tilak, and an appointed member of the Viceroy's legislative council, the legislature of the central government. He had made a good impression, Morley told Minto.
⁸⁰
To Gokhale he stressed the importance of Congress support; its opposition would endanger reform.
⁸¹

The Viceroy and the Civilians could see the writing on the wall but they were anything but cowed. Minto rejected the reversal of partition. The Civilians turned their hand to ‘reform’. They were already disillusioned with the Councils Act of 1892: here was the chance to revise it. In the scheme they drafted, pride of place was given to a new Chamber of Princes (to influence opinion in Britain and India) and a ‘native member’ of the Viceroy's government (to prove the Indianness of the Raj). The ‘natural leaders’ of Indian society, they argued, were the chiefs, landholders, merchants and bankers. They had little sympathy for Congress-type reform. But the legislative councils of 1892 had distorted the image of Indian opinion. Thirty-six per cent of council members had been lawyers, only 23 per cent landowners. Reform should reverse this trend. It should also give Muslims their own seats in the councils.
⁸²

The thinking behind these proposals was amplified in the Reforms Despatch sent off to London in March 1907. It was a remarkable manifesto of Civilian politics, perhaps the last great statement of Civilian ideology. It acknowledged that the Congress had done much to implant a sense of nationality across India, but insisted that most of the ‘educated class’ had little sympathy with its programme. It saw in Civilian rule the convergence of two great sources of authority: its inheritance from the Mughal past and its role as the trustee of ‘British principles’. The object of reform, it claimed, was to fuse them both in a ‘constitutional autocracy’: the Civilian Raj would ‘govern by rule’, merely reserving ‘the predominant and absolute power which it can only abdicate at the risk of bringing back the chaos to which our rule put an end’.
⁸³
If the legislative councils were enlarged to represent ‘all the interests that are capable of being represented’, and if the electorate were refashioned to prevent its falling ‘into the hands of wire-pullers’, a great common interest could be built up between the Raj and the ‘conservative classes’. ‘We are not without hope’, Minto's government concluded,